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JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 



BY JAMES DENNEY, D.D. 

Supplementary volume to " The Death of Christ " 
THE ATONEMENT AND THE MODERN MIND 
' Third Thousand 

Croivn octavo y clot A j net $l.oo 

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"The discussion though brief is clear and able." — Western 
Christian Advocate 

** A profound, though brief discussion, lucid and convincing. 
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** Prof. Denney could hardly have left his remarkable book on 
the death of Christ without this supplemental dealing with the 
Atonement. It is not often that we find a book of theological 
thought and argument which is so readable as this. It goes right 
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** To many it will carry the conviction it breathes." — The Outlook 

THE DEATH OF CHRIST 
Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament 
Croivn octavoy cloth, |5l.50 
** The most important contribution to the all important doctrine 
of the Atonement since the appearance of Dr. Dale's epoch-making 
book . . . Exegetically considered, it is the most important book 
published within the memory of the younger generation of preach- 
ers." — Neiv York Examiner 

NEW YORK : A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 



JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

CHRISTIANITY JUSTIFIED 
IN THE MIND OF CHRIST 

BY 

JAMES DENNEY, D. D. 

PROFESSOR OP NEW TESTAMENT LANQUAGK 

LITERATURE AND THEOLOGY, UNITED FREE 

CHURCH COLLEGE, GLASGOW; AUTHOR OF 

' ' THE DEATH OF CHRIST ' ' 



TtVa jxe Xeyere €u/ai; 



NEW YORK 

A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 

3 & S WEST EIGHTEENTH STREET 
MCMIX 



^6^D^ 



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LIBRARY of CONGRESS 

One Cepy ft«c««vtd 

FEB 10 1909 

Oeoyrlrtat Cntrv 
CLASS e^l *^ 



OOPTRIOHT, 1908, BT 
A. 0. ARMSTRONG k SON 






UXORI DILECTISSIMAE 



PREFACE 

The Introduction to this book makes its purpose suffi- 
ciently clear, and a preface is hardly needed except to 
indicate the readers whom the writer would wish to 
reach. 

The argument appeals, on the one hand, to those 
who are members of Christian Churches and to the 
Churches themselves. Amid the vast unsettlement of 
opinion which has been produced by the emancipation 
of the mind and its exercise on the general tradition of 
Christianity, it calls attention anew to the certainty of the 
things which we have been taught. It demonstrates, as 
the writer believes, that the attitude to Christ which 
has always been maintained in the Church is the one 
which is characteristic of the New Testament from 
beginning to end, and that this attitude is the only one 
which is consistent with the self-revelation of Jesus 
during His life on earth. But it makes clear at the 
same time that this Christian attitude to Jesus is all 
that is vital to Christianity, and that it is not bound 
up, as it is often supposed to be, with this or that in- 
tellectual construction of it, or with this or that definition 
or what it supposes or implies. The Church must bind 
its members to the Christian attitude to Christ, but it 
has no right to bind them to anything besides. It can 



viii JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

never overcome its own divisions, it can never appeal 
with the power of a unanimous testimony to the world, 
till both these truths are recognised to the full. 

On the other hand, the argument appeals to those 
who are outside of the Churches, who do not take up 
the Christian attitude to Christ, and who on general 
philosophical grounds, as they would say, decline even 
to discuss it. To them it is simply an appeal to look at 
the facts. They have a place for Jesus in their world, 
but it is not the place which Christian faith gives Him. 
It is the hope of the writer that he may convince some 
that it is not the place which He claims. This is surely 
a serious consideration. The mind of Christ is the 
greatest reality with which we can come into contact 
in the spiritual world, and it is not treating it with the 
respect which is its due, if we decide beforehand, as so 
many do, that Christ can only have in the life and faith 
of humanity the same kind of place as others who are 
spoken of as the founders of religions. The section of 
the book entided The Self-Revelation of Jesus is an 
attempt to bring out the significance which Jesus had, in 
His own mind, in relation to God and man. This can 
be done, as the writer is convinced, in a way which is 
historically unimpeachable; and unless we are pre- 
pared summarily to set aside Christ's consciousness of 
Himself, it is fatal to such appreciations of Him as have 
just been referred to. To be a Christian means, in one 
aspect of it, to take Christ at His own estimate; and it is 
one step to this to feel that He is putting the most serious 
of all questions when He asks, Who say ye that I am ? 



PREFACE ix 

.i 

Much of the indifference to Christianity in certain cir- | 

cles comes from the refusal to treat this question seriously. | 

It would fulfil the deepest desire of the writer if what he I 

has said of the self-revelation of Jesus prevailed with any I 

one who has regarded it as an unreal question to take it up J 

i 

in earnest, and to let the Christ who is historically attested i 

in the gospels freely appeal to his mind, not as an illus- | 

tration of some philosophical theorem of his own about ! 

God or Man, but as the Sovereign Person that He was 1 

and is. ' 

The writer wishes to express his thanks to Messrs. ,i 

T. and T. Clark for the use they have allowed him to \ 

make of an article on Preaching Christ contributed by \ 

him to their Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels, i 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION 

PAGE 

PLACE OF CHRIST IN NEW TESTAMENT FAITH, 
AND THE QUESTION WHETHER THIS PLACE IS 
THAT WHICH HE CLAIMED FOR HIMSELF . . I 



BOOK I 

CHRISTIANITY AS IT IS EXHIBITED IN THE 
NEW TESTAMENT 



introduction: the unity and variety of the 
new testament 



I. CHRIST IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN PREACHING 

U CHRIST IN THE FAITH OF PAUL . 

m. CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 

IV. CHRIST IN THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 

V. CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 

xi 



12 

39 

42 

44 



xu 



JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 



VI. CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE OF JUDE AND IN THE 

SECOND EPISTLE OF PETER .... 47 



Vn. CHRIST IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS 

(a) The Gospel according to Mark 

(b) The Gospel according to Matthew 

(c) The Gospel according to Luke 

Vin. CHRIST IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 

(a) The Apocalypse 

(&) The Epistles of John 

(c) The Gospel according to John 



SUMMARY AND TRANSITION 



SO 
52 

55 

60 

64 
65 
71 

77 
90 



BOOK II 

THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF THE CHRISTIAN j 

FAITH i 



I. The Resurrection of Jesus. 

THE EASTER FAITH AND THE EASTER MESSAGE . . 99 

THE OLDEST HISTORICAL EVIDENCE . . . .102 



MORAL CONSIDERATIONS INVOLVED IN A TRUE APPRE- 
CIATION OF IT 



IIO 



CONTENTS xiii 

PAGE 

THE HISTORICAL AND THE SPIRITUAL EVIDENCE AS 

COMBINED IN I COR. XV 1x8 

THE APPEARANCES OF THE RISEN JESUS . . . 126 

Difficulties as to their order . . . .126 
Progressive materialisation . . . .129 

Difficulties as to the scene of the appearings . 132 

FUNCTION OF THE EVANGELISTS IN RELATION TO THE 

RESURRECTION 1 38 



II. The Self-Revelation of Jesus. 
(a) Preliminary critical considerations, 

dogmatic PRECONCEPTIONS TO BE EXCLUDED . . 144 

CHARACTER OF THE EVANGELIC DOCUMENTS . . .145 

IDEA THAT HISTORICAL CRITICISM IS IRRELEVANT TO 

CHRISTIANITY 149 

IDEA THAT ITS PRESUPPOSITIONS ARE FATAL TO 

CHRISTIANITY 153 

HISTORICAL CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL ACCORDING 

TO MARK 156 

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF THE OTHER PRIMITIVE 

SOURCE— *Q' 168 



xiv JESUS AND THE GOSPEL j 

■j 
(b) Detailed Study oj the earliest sources as illustrating the \ 

self-consciousness oj Jesus, ] 

PAGE 

THE BAPTISM OF JESUS . . . , . .177 

THE TEMPTATIONS * . . l86 

I 

JESUS AND THE TWELVE ! THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLE- \ 

SHIP 192 j 

{ 

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 214 ; 

j 

THE HEALING OF THE CENTURION'S SERVANT: FAITH \ 

IN JESUS ........ 226 

JESUS AND JOHN THE BAPTIST 228 < 

i 
\ 

THE GREAT THANKSGIVING OF JESUS . . . .2^6 { 

\ 

ISOLATED EXPRESSIONS IN WHICH JESUS* CONSCIOUSNESS 

OF HIMSELF IS REVEALED: Matt. Il^Off.^ 12 30^ \ 

i2«'«'^, i3i«S 2334"- 247 i 

PASSAGES IN WHICH JESUS SPEAKS OF HIMSELF AS THE I 

SON OF MAN . 255 ; 

mark's HISTORY THE HISTORY OF THE SON OF GOD . 269 j 

i 
A TYPICAL 86vafjLt9 OR MIGHTY WORK IN WHICH JESUS' | 

CONSCIOUSNESS OF HIMSELF IS REVEALED : FAITH IN \ 

JESUS .271 



CONTENTS XV 

PAGE 

THE BRIDEGROOM AND THE CHILDREN OF THE 

BRIDECHAMBER 279 

THE UNPARDONABLE SIN IN MARK . . . .283 

THE MESSIAH AND THE cross: Mark 8^^-10^ . . 284 

THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM . . . 307 

THE WICKED HUSBANDMEN : SERVANTS AND THE SON . 308 

DAVID'S SON AND DAVID 'S LORD 3 II 

THE DATE OF THE PAROUSIA 313 

THE LAST SUPPER 315 

THE FINAL CONFESSION 324 

CONCLUSION 

THE ONE CHRISTIAN FAITH VINDICATED IN THE MIND OF 

CHRIST ...... ... 329 

OBJECTION BASED ON THE IRRELEVANCE OF HISTORY 

TO FAITH 330 

OBJECTION BASED ON THE UNRELIABLENESS OF THE 

HISTORY IN QUESTION . . . . . -332 

THE RIGHT OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY SECURED . 336 

THE RIGHT OF INTELLECTUAL LIBERTY SECURED . -337 



xvi JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

PAGE 

ATTITUDE OP INDIVIDUALS AND OF CHURCHES TO 

THESE CONCLUSIONS 340 

THEIR BEARING ON THE UNION OF CHURCHES . . 343 

SIMPLIFICATION OF THEOLOGICAL CREEDS FALLACIOUS . 345 

A UNITING CONFESSION OF FAITH . . . • . 350 

OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED 352 

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY AND HOW TO SECURE IT . 358 

INDEX OF NEW TESTAMENT PASSAGES .... 363 



INTRODUCTION 

When we open the New Testament we find ourselves 
in presence of a glowing religious life. There is nothing 
in the world which offers any real parallel either to this 
life, or to the collection of books which attests it. The 
soul, w^hich in contemporary literature is bound in shal- 
lows and in miseries, is here raised as on a great tidal 
wave of spiritual blessing. Nothing that belongs to a 
complete religious life is wanting, neither convictions 
nor motives, neither penitence nor ideals, neither vo- 
cation nor the assurance of victory. And from be- 
ginning to end, in all its parts and aspects and elements, 
this reUgious life is determined by Christ. It owes its 
character at every point to Him. Its convictions are 
convictions about Him. Its hopes are hopes which He 
has inspired and which it is for Him to fulfil. Its ideals 
are born of His teaching and His life. Its strength is,o 
the strength of His spirit. If we sum it up in the one 
word faith, it is faith in God through Him — a faith 
which owes to Him all that is characteristic in it, all that 
distinguishes it from what is elsewhere known among 
men by that name. 

This, at least, is the prima facie impression which 
the New Testament makes upon a reader brought up in 
the Christian Church. The simplest way to express it 
is to say that Christianity as it is represented in the 
New Testament is the life of faith in Jesus Christ. It 
is a life in which faith is directed to Him as its object, 
and in which everything depends upon the fact that the 



2 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

believer can be sure of his Lord. Christ so conceived 
is a person of transcendent greatness, but He is a real 
person, a historical person, and the representations of 
His greatness are true. They reproduce the reality 
which He is, and they justify that attitude of the soul to 
Him which the early Christians called faith, and which 
was the spring of all their Christian experiences. This, 
we repeat, is the impression which the New Testament 
makes on the ordinary Christian reader, but it is possible 
to react against it. In point of fact, the reaction has 
taken place, and has been profound and far-reaching. 
Two main questions have been raised by it which it is 
the object of the present work to examine. The first 
is. How far is the description just given of the New 
Testament correct? Is it the case that the Christian 
religious life, as the New Testament exhibits it, really 
puts Jesus into the place indicated, and that everything 
in this life, and everything especially in the relations of 
God and man, is determined by Him? In other words, 
is it the case that from the very beginning Christianity 
has existed only in the form of a faith which has Christ 
as its object, and not at all in the form of a faith which 
has had Christ simply as its living pattern? The sec- 
ond question is of importance to those who accept what 
seems at a glance the only possible answer to the first. 
It is this: Can the Christian religion, as the New Tes- 
tament exhibits it, justify itself by appeal to Jesus? 
Granting that the spiritual phenomenon is what it is 
said to be, are the underlying historical facts sufficient 
to sustain it? In particular, it may be said, is the mind 
of Christians about Christ supported by the mind of 
Christ about Himself? Is that which has come to be 
known in the world as Christian faith — ^known, let us 
admit, in the apostolic age and ever since — such faith 
as Jesus lived and died to produce? Did He take for 



INTRODUCTION 3 

Himself the extraordinary place which He fills in the mind 
and the world even of primitive Christians, or was this 
greatness thrust upon Him without His knowledge, against 
His will, and in inconsistency with His true place and 
nature? We are familiar with the idea that we can 
appeal to Christ against any phenomenon of our own age 
which claims to be Christian; is it not conceivable that 
we may have to appeal to Him even against the earUest 
forms which Christianity assumed ? 

No one who is familiar with the currents of thought 
whether within or without the Church can doubt that 
these questions are of present and urgent interest. To 
some, indeed, it may seem that there are questions more 
fundamental, and that when men are discussing whether 
Jesus ever lived, or whether we know anything about Him, 
it is trifling to ask whether the apostolic faith in Him 
is justified by the facts of His history. No serious person, 
however, doubts that Jesus existed, and the second of 
our two questions has been stated in the most searching 
form conceivable. It raises in all its dimensions the 
problem of the life and mind of Jesus, and in answering 
it we shall have opportunity to examine fully the sources 
on which our knowledge of Jesus rests. For those who 
stand outside the Christian Church, this second ques- 
tion is naturally of greater interest than the other, yet 
even for them it is impossible to ignore the connexion 
of the two. For it is in the Church and through its 
testimony to Jesus that whatever knowledge we have of 
Him, even in the purely historical sense, has been pre- 
served. But for those who are within the Church, the 
first question also has an interest of its own. To ask 
whether the prima facie impression which the New Tes- 
tament makes upon us is verified by a closer examination 
— ^whether the interpretation of Christ which is current 
in the Church is that which is really yielded by the primi- 



4 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

live witnesses — ^is to ask in other words whether the 
Church's faith to-day is continuous with that of apostoHc 
times; and there can be few Christians who are indifferent 
to the answer. But though the profession of indifference 
would be absurd, it is not absurd to aim at sincerity and 
truth. No one can be more anxious to know the truth 
than the man to whom it means a great deal that the 
truth should be thus or thus. It we could imagine a per- 
son to whom it was a matter of indifference whether the 
Christian Church of to-day imderstood rightly or wrongly 
what the New Testament means by Christian faith, or 
who did not care in the least whether the historical facts 
about Jesus justified that faith or not, we should have 
imagined a person not ideally competent but absolutely 
incompetent to deal with either the one question or the 
other. The writer does not wish to disguise the fact that 
he is vitally interested in both, for he is convinced that 
on no other condition is there any likelihood of the true 
answer being found. But he disclaims at the same time 
any 'apologetic' intention. There is no policy in what he 
has written, either in its manner or its substance. No- 
thing, so far as he is conscious, is set down for any other 
reason than that he believes it to be the truth, and nothing 
is to be discounted or allowed for as though he were 
mediating or negotiating between the progressive and 
the stationary elements in a Christian society, and would 
have said more or less if he had been free to speak with- 
out reserve. To the best of his knowledge he speaks 
without reserve, and has neither more nor less to say. 
This does not exclude the intention and the hope to say 
what may be of service to Christian faith and to the 
Christian Church; all it excludes is the idea that Chris- 
tian faith or the Christian Church can be served by any- 
thing else than simple truth. 
The two questions with which we have to deal are 



INTRODUCTION 5 

in one important respect of very different character. The 
first is quite simple: Is the conception of the Christian 
religion which prevails and has always prevailed in the 
Church borne out by the New Testament ? As we know 
it, and as it has been known in history, the Christian life 
is the life of faith in Jesus Christ: is this what it was in 
primitive times? Does the New Testament throughout 
give that solitary and all-determining place to Jesus 
which He holds in the later Christian religion? This 
is a simple question, and no difficulty can be raised about 
the proper method of answering it. All we have to do 
is to go to the New Testament and scrutinise its evidence. 
The laws of interpretation are agreed upon among in- 
telligent people, and no difficulty about 'presuppositions' 
is raised. But the second question is of a different kind. 
It has to do with what is historically known of Jesus, 
and here the difficulty about 'presuppositions' becomes 
acute. It is possible to argue that much of what the 
New Testament records concerning Jesus cannot be his- 
torically known — ^that it transcends the conception of 
what is historical, and must either be known on other 
terms than history, or dismissed from the region of 
knowledge altogether. It is not necessary at this stage 
to raise the abstract problem; when we come to the sec- 
ond question it will be considered as far as the case requires. 
Here the writer would only express his distrust of d, 
priori determinations of what is possible either in the 
natural or the historical sphere. There is only one uni- 
verse: nature is not the whole of it, neither is history; 
and neither nature nor history is a whole apart from it. 
Nature and history do not exist in isolation; they are 
caught up into a moral and spiritual system with which 
they are throughout in vital relations. It is not for any- 
one to say offhand and h priori what is or is not naturally 
or historically conceivable in such a system. Its possi- 



6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

bilities, in all likelihood, rather transcend than fall short 
of our anticipations; we need not be too much surprised 
if experience calls rather for elasticity than for rigidity 
of mind. If anything is certain, it is that the world is 
not made to the measure of any science or philosophy, 
but on a scale which perpetually summons philosophy 
and science to construct themselves anew; and it is with 
the undogmatic temper which recognises this that the 
problems indicated above are approached in this book. 



^ 



BOOK I 

CHRISTIANITY AS IT IS EXHIBITED IN 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 



BOOK I 

CHRISTIANITY AS IT IS EXHIBITED IN 
THE NEW TESTAMENT 

INTRODUCTION 

It has been said above that in the New Testament we 
are confronted with a rehgious life in which everything 
is determined by Christ, and the question we have to 
consider is whether this is really so. Is there such a 
thing as New Testament Christianity, a spiritual phenom- 
enon with a unity of its own, and is this imity consti- 
tuted by the common attitude of all Christian souls to 
Christ? 

The instinctive answer of those who have been brought 
up in the Christian faith is in the affirmative. They 
cannot doubt that New Testament Christianity is one 
consistent thing. They are equally at home in all parts 
of the New Testament; they recognise throughout in it 
the common faith, the faith which gives Jesus the name 
which is above every name. This instinctive assurance 
of the unity of the New Testament is not disturbed by 
even the keenest sense of the differences which persist 
along with it. Criticism is a science of discrimination, 
and the critical study of the New Testament has had the 
greater part of its work to do in bringing into relief the 
distinctions in what was once supposed to be a uniform 
and dead level. The science of New Testament theology, 
if it is a science, has defined the various types of primitive 
teaching by contrast to one another; it has taught us 

9 



10 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

to distinguish Peter and Paul, James and John, instead 
of losing them in the vague conception of 'apostolic' 
Even the reader who is not a professional student is 
aware of the distinctions, though he has no temptation 
to press them. He is conscious that the dialectical dis- 
cussions of Galatians and Romans are profoundly unlike 
the intuitive and contemplative epistles of John. When 
he reads the first verses of Hebrews or of the Fourth 
Gospel he becomes aware that he has entered a new 
intellectual atmosphere; this is not the air which he 
breathes in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. That new method 
of study known to Germans as the * religionsgeschicht- 
liche Methode,' which regards the Christianity of the 
New Testament as a supreme example of religious syn- 
cretism, and by the help of the science of comparative 
religion traces all the elements of it to their independent 
sources, of course still further emphasises the differences. 
To it, Christianity is a stream which has its proximate 
source in Jesus; but as the stream flows out into the 
world tributaries pour into it from every side, swelling, 
colouring, sometimes poisoning its waters. This process 
does not begin, as we have perhaps been taught to be- 
lieve, when the New Testament closes, so that we have 
the New Testament as a standard for the perpetual 
restoration of the true faith: it begins at the very begin- 
ning. The New Testament itself is the earliest witness 
to it, and it is the New Testament itself which we must 
purge if we would get Christianity pure and undefiled. 
All the sacramentarianism, for example, which we find 
in Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians; all the nascent 
Catholicism of Acts and the Pastoral Epistles; all the 
religious materialism which in one form or another con- 
nects itself with the Church and its ministry, has to be 
explained and discounted on these lines. It cannot be 
traced to Christ, and therefore it is not Christian; it can 



NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTIANITY ii 

be traced to other sources, and when we know what these 
are we understand it, and can rate it at its true value. 
It is not necessary to discuss this method of study here. 
Its right is unquestioned, and, though Hke all new things 
it is apt to go to some heads with intoxicating power, it 
has brought light to a few dark places in the New Testa- 
ment, and has doubtless more to bring. The point at 
present is that it emphasises certain differences which 
exist in the New Testament, differences which (it asserts) 
may amount to a direct contradiction of essential Chris- 
tian truth. 

No one, it will be admitted, can deny that the New 
Testament has variety as well as unity. It is the variety 
which gives interest to the imity. The reality and power 
of the unity are in exact proportion to the variety; we 
feel how potent the unity must be which can hold all this 
variety together in the energies of a common life. The 
question raised by every demonstration of the undeniable 
differences which characterise the New Testament is. 
What is the vital force which triumphs over them all? 
What is it in which these people, differing as widely as' 
they do, are vitally and fundamentally at one, so that 
through all their differences they form a brotherhood, and 
are conscious of an indissoluble spiritual bond? There 
can be no doubt that that which unites them is a common 
relation to Christ — a. common faith in Him involving 
common religious convictions about Him. Such at any 
rate is the opinion of the writer, and it is the purpose 
of the following pages to give the proof of it in detail. 
Everywhere in the New Testament, it will be shown, we 
are in contact with a religious life which is determined 
throughout by Christ. Be the difference between the 
various witnesses what they will, there is no difference 
on this point. In the relations of God and man, every- 
thing turns upon Christ and upon faith in Him. There 



12 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

is no Christianity known to the New Testament except 
that in which He has a place all His own, a place of 
absolute significance, to which there is no analogy else- 
where. We do not raise here the question whether this 
is right or wrong, whether it agrees or does not agree 
with the mind or intention of Christ Himself — this is re- 
served for subsequent treatment: all we are at present 
concerned with is the fact. It is not assumed, but it will 
appear as the unquestionable result of the detailed ex- 
amination, that Christianity never existed in the world 
as a religion in which men shared the faith of Jesus, but 
was from the very beginning, and amid all undeniable 
diversities, a religion in which Jesus was the object of 
faith. To all believers Jesus belonged to the divine as 
truly as to the human sphere. In the practical sense 
of believing in Him they all confessed His Godhead. 
This is the fact which we now proceed to prove and 
illustrate. 



CHRIST IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN PREACHING 

Our investigation of the evidence naturally begins 
with the accounts of the primitive Christian preaching in 
Acts. Fortunately for our purpose we have no critical 
questions to encounter here. Even those who hold with 
Renan that the early pages of Acts are the most unhis- 
torical in the New Testament make an exception in 
favour of the passages with which we are concerned. 
'Almost the only element,' says Schmiedel,^ 'that is his- 
torically important (in the early chapters of Acts) is the 
Christology of the speeches of Peter. This, however, is 
important in the highest degree. ... It is hardly possible 

^ EncyclopcBdia Biblica, 42. 



PRIMITIVE CHRISTIAN PREACHING 13 

not to believe that this Christology of the speeches of 
Peter must have come from a primitive source.' Perhaps 
what it is most important to notice is that from the very- 
beginning there really is a Christology. The question 
which Jesus put to His disciples while He was with them, 
Whom say ye that I am? was one which they could not 
help putting to themselves. If we hold that the Son, 
properly speaking, has no place in the gospel, but only 
the Father, then the question is a misleading one; it sets 
the mind off spiritually on a wrong track. This seems, 
in spite of ambiguities, to be the conviction of scholars 
like Harnack, who thinks that Christology is a mistake, 
and would lighten the distressed ship of the gospel by 
throwing it overboard.* He goes so far as to censure 
the primitive Church for turning aside from its proper 
duty — ^teaching men to observe all things that Jesus had 
commanded — ^to the apologetic task of proving that Jesus 
was the Christ.^ Our present question, we repeat, is not 
whether Peter and the other early preachers fulfilled their 
calling well or ill, but what it was that they actually did, 
and of this there can be no doubt. Their own relation 
to Jesus, as we see it in Acts, depends finally upon His 
Resurrection and His gift of the Spirit; and though 
these may be said in a sense to transcend history, they 
do not lie beyond experience. Peter had seen the Risen 
Jesus and received the Holy Spirit: in virtue of these 
experiences, Jesus had a place in his Hfe and his faith 
which belonged to Him alone. He was both Lord and 
Christ, and there was nothing in the rehgious world of 
the apostle that was not henceforth determined by Him. 
It is this religious significance of Jesus, rather than the 
Christology of Peter, in the strict sense of the term, which 
it is our purpose to exhibit. 
The apostle starts in his preaching from the historical 

^Das Wesen des Christentums, 79 f. ^ Dogmengeschichte, i. 57 f. 



14 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

person of Jesus, and appeals to his hearers to confirm 
what he says: 'Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of 
God unto you by miracles and portents and signs which 
God wrought through Him, as you yourselves know' 
(Acts 2 ^'2). We cannot tell what precisely was the sig- 
nificance to Peter of the wonderful works of Jesus, which 
are here assumed to be matter of common knowledge; 
the expression 'a, man approved of God' is somewhat 
indefinite, and need not mean that Jesus was demon- 
strated by these works to be the Messiah. In point of 
fact, the characteristic of this primitive Christianity is 
not the beUef that Jesus was the Christ, but the belief 
that He is the Christ. He was while on earth what all 
men had seen and known — a man approved of God by 
His might in word and deed; He is now what the preach- 
ing of the apostles declares Him to be — ^both Lord and 
Christ. This preaching is not, indeed, independent of 
the historical life of Jesus. When a man was chosen to 
take the place of Judas, and to be associated with the 
eleven as a witness of the Resurrection, he was chosen 
from the men 'who have companied with us all the time 
that the Lord Jesus went in and went out among us, begin- 
ning from the baptism of John unto the day that He was 
received up from us' (Acts i ^^ *)• The criticism which 
would have us believe that from the Resurrection onv/ard 
the Jesus of history was practically displaced by an ideal 
Christ of faith is beside the mark. The Christ of faith 
was the Jesus of history, and no one was regarded as 
qualified to bear witness to the Christ unless he had had 
the fullest opportunity of knowing Jesus. Nevertheless, 
Jesus is demonstrated to be the Christ and is preached 
in that character, not merely or even mainly on the 
ground of what He had said and done on earth, but on 
the ground of His exaltation to God's right hand, and 
His gift of the Holy Spirit. It is in this exaltation and 



THE CHRIST OF PETER 15 

in this wonderful outpouring of divine life that He is 
seen to be what He is, and takes the place in human 
souls which establishes the Christian religion. 

The Christ, of course, is a Jewish title, and it is easy 
to say impatient or petulant things about it. There are 
those who profess devotion to Jesus and tell us that they 
do not care whether He was (or is) the Christ or not; 
those who thank God, not without complacency, that to 
them He is far more and far better than the Christ; 
those who assure us that Christianity is a misnomer, and 
that our religion should find a more descriptive name. 
Such superior persons betray a lack of historical discern- 
ment, and it is wiser on the whole to accept the world as 
God has made it than to reconstruct it on lines of our 
own. The conception of Jesus as the Christ, if we 
interpret it by the teaching of Peter in the early chapters 
of Acts, is not one which it is easy to disparage. It 
embodies at least two great truths about Jesus as the 
apostle regarded Him. The first is that Jesus is King. 
That is the very meaning of the term. The Christ is 
the Lord's Anointed, and the throne on which He has 
been set in His exaltation is the throne of God Himself. 
It is a translation of this part of the meaning of the term 
into less technical language when Peter says elsewhere: 
'Jesus Christ, He is Lord of all' (Acts 10^^). Simple as 
it is, this assertion of the sovereignty of Jesus covers all 
that is characteristic in historical Christianity. If it dis- 
appeared, all that has ever been known to history as 
Christianity would disappear along with it. It belonged 
to Christian faith from the beginning that in it all men 
should stand on a level with one another, but all should 
at the same time confront Christ and do homage to Him 
as King. The second truth covered and guarded by the 
conception of Jesus as the Christ is this: that He is the 
Person through whom God's Kingdom comes, and 



i6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

through whom all God's promises are fulfilled. In this 
sense the name is a symbol of the continuity of the work 
of God, and a guarantee of its accomplishment. This is 
the historical importance of it. 'To Him bear all the 
prophets witness' (Acts lo*^). All prophecy is in essence 
Messianic. All the hopes which God has inspired in the 
hearts of men, whether by articulate voices in the Old 
Testament, or by the providential guidance of the race, 
or by the very constitution of human nature, must look 
to Him to be made good. To borrow the language of 
Paul, 'How many soever are the promises of God, in 
him is the Yea' (2 Cor. i ^^). They must be fulfilled in 
Him, or not at all; or rather we should say. They have 
been fulfilled in Him, and in no other. 

The exclusive place which is thus given to Jesus as 
the Christ is insisted upon from the first. Whether we 
regard Him as the King to whom all must do homage, 
or as the central and supreme figure in history, through 
whom God's final purpose is to be achieved. He stands 
alone. There cannot be another, who shares as He 
does the throne of God; there cannot be another to 
whom all the prophets bear witness, and on whom all the 
hopes of humanity depend. This is not only implied in 
the place taken by Jesus in the faith of the apostle; it 
has come to clear consciousness in the apostle's mind, 
and is explicitly asserted in his preaching. 'In none 
other is there salvation; for neither is there any other 
name under heaven, that is given among men, wherein 
we must be saved' (Acts 4^^). If we can rely upon 
these words as representing the mind of Peter — and the 
writer can see no reason to question them — it is clear 
that Jesus had in the earliest preaching and the earliest 
faith of Christians that solitary and incommunicable 
place which the Church assigns Him still. 

It is worth while, however, to bring out more distinctly 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF PETER 17 

the spiritual contents which the apostle found in his 
Christ. For those to whom he preached there was a 
hideous contradiction in the very idea that one should 
be the Christ who had died the accursed death of the 
Cross, and in so far as Peter's sermons are apologetic 
they deal with this difficulty. He meets it in two ways. 
On the one hand, the death of Jesus was divinely neces- 
sary; He was delivered up by the determined counsel 
and foreknowledge of God. The evidence of this divine 
necessity was no doubt found in the Scriptures (Acts 
2 ^^; I Cor. 15 ^); and when we notice that in describing 
the death of Jesus Peter twice uses the Deuteronomic 
phrase 'hanged upon a tree,' which to Paul was the 
symbol of Christ made a curse for us (Acts 5^®, 10^^; 
Deut. 21 ^^; Gal. 3 ^^), it is perhaps not going too far to 
suggest that the atoning virtue of Christ's death was an 
idea as well as a power in the primitive Church. But 
however that may be, it is certain that the difficulties 
presented by His death to faith in the Messiahship of 
Jesus were practically annulled by His Resurrection and 
Exaltation. It was this which made Him both Lord 
and Christ, and in this character He determined for the 
apostles and for all believers their whole relation to God. 
To Him they owed already the gift of the Holy Spirit; 
and the gift of the Holy Spirit, Peter argues elsewhere, is 
the sufficient and final proof that men are right with God 
(Acts II ^^ ^^, 15 ^). To His coming again, or rather to 
His coming in His character of the Christ, they looked 
for times of refreshing, nay for the consummation of 
human history, 'the times of the restoration of all things 
whereof God spake by the mouth of His holy prophets 
which have been from of old' (Acts 3 ^^). Much stress 
has been laid on the eschatological aspects of the primi- 
tive faith in Jesus as the Christ, and they are not to be 
ignored; but neither may we ignore the spiritual char- 



i8 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

acter of the salvation which men owe here and now to 
the Christ who is to come. 'Repent and be baptized 
every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for remis- 
sion of your sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy 
Spirit' (Acts 2 ^^). Remission of sins and the gift of the 
Holy Spirit: these are the present religious experiences 
which are offered to men through faith in the 'eschato- 
logicaP Christ. But these are supremely gifts of God, 
and we do not appreciate truly the place of Christ in the 
apostle's faith until we see that where salvation is con- 
cerned He stands upon God's side, confronting men. 
The most vivid expression is given to this in Acts 2 ^^ : 
'Being therefore by the right hand of God exalted, and 
having received of the Father the promise of the Holy 
Spirit, He hath poured forth this which ye see and hear.' 
There can be no doubt that in this passage Peter looks 
upon Jesus in His exaltation as forming with God His 
Father one Divine causality at work through the Spirit 
for the salvation of men. His humanity is not ques- 
tioned or curtailed; it has been spoken of without pre- 
judice in words which immediately precede. But His 
relation to those experiences which constitute Christian 
life is that of being their Author, the Divine Source 
from which they come; he is not to Christian faith a 
Christian, but all Christians owe their being, as such, to 
Him. We may have any opinion we please about the 
rightness or the wrongness of this, but it is not possible 
to question the fact. We may argue that the history of 
the Church, like that of the human race, began with a 
fall — that the apostolic belief in the Resurrection was a 
mistake, and the spiritual experiences which accompa- 
nied it morbid phenomena to be referred to the mental 
pathologist; but even if we do, we must admit that primi- 
tive Christianity gave Jesus in its faith the extraordinary 
place which has just been described. He is the Christ, 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 19 

the Prince of Life, Lord of all, Judge of the living and 
the dead, at God's right hand, the Giver of the Spirit, the 
fulfiller of all the promises of God. He is not the first 
of Christians or the best of men, but something abso- 
lutely different from this. The apostles and their con- 
verts are not persons who share the faith of Jesus; they 
are persons who have Jesus as the object of their faith, 
and who believe in God through Him. 



II 

CHRIST IN THE FAITH OF PAUL 

There is an idea abroad that it does not much matter 
what Paul thought of Christ, because he never knew 
Him. He had not that acquaintance with Him during 
His public ministry on which, as we have seen, stress 
was laid in choosing a successor to Judas; his Christ, 
therefore, cannot but have been an ideal and theological 
rather than a real person. He has even been charged, 
on the grouad of a difficult expression in one of his 
epistles (2 Cor. 5 ^®), with disparaging the kind of know- 
ledge to which importance was attached in Jerusalem, 
and much of the modern criticism of his theology really 
assumes with the Pharisaic Christianity of Acts that he 
lacked the indispensable qualifications of an apostle. 
We even find scholars like Gunkel congratulating them- 
selves on this ground that Paul's influence speedily 
waned.* It would have been all over with Qhristianity 
as a beneficent historical force if the synoptic gospels 
had not come to the front and established an ascendancy 
in the Church which to a great extent neutralised the 
Pauline gospel. If the question before us were, What 

' Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes, 56. 



20 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

did Paul know of Jesus of Nazareth? it would not be 
difficult to reduce these assertions to their true propor- 
tions. Paul did not live in a vacuum; he lived in the 
primitive Christian society in which all that was known 
of Jesus was current, and he could not, by the most 
determined and obstinate effort, have been as ignorant of 
Jesus as he is sometimes represented to be. Among 
his most intimate friends and fellow-workers, at different 
periods of his life, were Mark and Luke, the authors of 
our second and third gospels. There is much to be said 
for the idea of Mr. Wright,^ that they worked as cate- 
chists in the Pauline Churches. Is it conceivable that 
the apostle did not know what they taught, and did not 
care? If this reasoning seems too a priori, or too much 
based on mere probabilities, to carry conviction, it only 
needs such a searching examination of the apostle's 
writings as Feine's Jesus Christus und Paulus to raise it 
beyond doubt. Paul was in no sense ignorant of Jesus. 
If our synoptic gospels are not works of imagination, but 
a genuine deposit of tradition — and this is the only view 
which is represented by serious scholars — ^then the sub- 
stance of them must have been as familiar to Paul as it 
is to us. 

In view, however, of the question which we are dis- 
cussing, Paul's knowledge of Jesus is beside the mark. 
Whether he knew Jesus or not, whether his influence on 
Christianity has been pernicious or not, he is the most 
important figure in Christian history. He did more than 
any of the apostles to win for the Christian religion its 
place in the life of the world, and he has done more than 
any of them in always winning that place again when 
it seemed in danger of being lost. Evangelical revival, 
in personalities so powerful as Luther, Wesley, and 
Chalmers, has always been kindled afresh at the flame 

' The Composition of the Four Gospels, cc. i. and ii. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 21 

which bums inextinguishable in his testimony to Christ. 
Hence, quite apart from any question as to its justi- 
fication or otherwise, nothing can be of more consequence 
than to ascertain the place which Christ actually filled 
in the faith and life of the apostle. Was He to him what 
we have seen Him to be in the faith of the primitive 
Church? 

In one respect at least, the answer cannot be doubt- 
ful. Paul's Christian life began with the appearance to 
him of the Risen Saviour; to him, as to Peter, in virtue 
of His exaltation the crucified Jesus was both Lord and 
Christ. With the splendour of that appearance present 
to his mind Paul calls Jesus the Lord of glory (i Cor. 2 ^) ; 
to acknowledge Him in this character is to make the 
fundamental Christian confession in which all believers 
are united (i Cor. 12^; Rom. 10®). It is often said 
that whatever doctrinal differences may be detected in 
the New Testament, there is no trace of Christological 
disputes. It is not quite clear that this is the case, nor 
is it clear that it must be so. It may quite fairly be 
argued from such a passage as 2 Cor. i ^^ — Now God^s 
Son — 'God's' has a strong emphasis — who was preached 
among you hy us, 1 mean by me and Silvanus and Timo- 
theus, was not yea and nay — that Paul was acquainted 
with preachers of another stamp than himself and his 
friends, whose Jesus was not in his sense God's Son, 
but perhaps only the son of David. There is something, 
too, to support this in 2 Cor. 1 1 ^ where we hear of ' another 
Jesus,' which means a 'different spirit' and a 'different 
gospel.' But, however this may be, it is certain that the 
Risen Jesus fills the same place in the religion of Paul 
as in that of Peter. To both apostles He is Lord and 
Christ. To both He is exalted at God's right hand. In 
the faith of both He comes again to judge the living and 
the dead, It is of Him that both say, with that great and 



22 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

terrible day in view, ' Whosoever shall call upon the name 
of the Lord shall be saved' (Acts 2^^; Rom. 10^^). If 
Peter cries to the Jews, ' There is not salvation in any other' 
(Acts 4*^), Paul writes to the Gentiles, 'Other founda- 
tion can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ' 
(i Cor. 3 ^^). The absolute religious significance of Jesus, 
in all the relations of God and man, is the specific quality 
of the new faith as it appears in both. 

The place Paul has filled in the history of Christianity 
justifies us in showing with some detail how this absolute 
religious significance of Christ pervades and dominates 
his spiritual life. 

Sometimes it comes out quite casually, where, as we 
might say, he is not specially thinking about it. Thus 
in the salutations of his epistles he habitually wishes the 
churches grace and peace from God our Father and the 
Lord Jesus Christ (Rom. i '; i Cor. i ^; 2 Cor. i ^; Gal. 
I ^, etc.), or he writes to them as societies which have 
their being in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ 
(i Thess. I ^; 2 Thess. i ^). This is exactly parallel, 
in the place it gives to Jesus, to what we have already 
seen in Acts 2. Paul would not think any more than 
Peter of questioning the real and complete humanity of 
Jesus; but when he thinks of the grace and peace by 
which the Church lives, he does not think of Jesus as 
sharing in them with himself; he sets Him instinctively 
and spontaneously on the side of God from whom they 
come. If the Father is the source, Christ is the channel 
of these blessings; the Father and the Son together con- 
front men as the divine power to which salvation is due. 

Sometimes, again, the place Christ has in Paul's faith 
comes out in a single word; for example, when in i Cor. 
15 ^^ he calls Him without qualification 'the Son.' This 
passage, in which the apostle tells us that when the end 
comes the Son Himself shall be subject to Him who put 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 23 

all things under Him, that God may be all in all, is some- 
times cited to justify minimising or disparaging views 
of Christ's place, but nothing could be more inept. The 
person here spoken of has already brought to nought 
* every principality, and every authority and power.' He 
has put all His enemies under His feet. He has destroyed 
death. He has fulfilled all the purposes and promises 
of God. All that God has designed to do for men, He 
has now done through Him as Messianic King, and the 
ends of His Kingship being achieved Christ hands over 
the kingdom to His Father. But that does not touch 
the fact that these ends have been achieved through Him, 
and that they can be achieved through no other. What 
other could do what Christ is here represented as having 
done for men? What other could hold the place in the 
apostle's mind which He holds? What other could be 
called simpliciter 'the Son'? The handing over of the 
kingdom to the Father does not compromise the solitary 
greatness which is conveyed by this name; it leaves the 
Son in that incomparable place which is suggested by His 
own solemn words in Mark 13 ^2. 

The religious attitude of Paul to Christ is made plainer 
still by the passages in which he involuntarily or delib- 
erately contrasts Him with men. Thus in defending 
his apostleship to the Galatians he speaks of himself 
as an apostle who did not owe his calling to a human 
source nor get it through a human channel, but through 
Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised Him from 
the dead (Gal. i *). The last words show that when he 
mentions Jesus Christ it is the Risen Lord he has in view, 
and nothing could bring out more clearly than the broad 
contrast of this sentence how instinctively and decisively 
Paul sets the Risen Christ side by side with God the Father 
in contrast to all that is human. That is his place in the 
Christian religion. He is not in any sense one of those 



24 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

who have been or are being saved; he is included in the 
divine causality by which salvation is accomplished. It 
would never have occurred to Paul to deny that Jesus 
of Nazareth who was crucified at Jerusalem was true man, 
but however he may have reronciled this with his faith 
as a Christian, that faith indubitably put Jesus into the 
sphere of the divine. The apostolic calling which came to 
Paul through him was not a calling of man, but of God, 
and the same holds of all the experiences which the apos- 
tle owes to Christ. Another illustration of this may be 
given. 'What is ApoUos? What is Paul?' the apostle 
asks, rebuking the party spirit at Corinth. 'Ministers 
through whom ye believed, and each as the Lord gave 
to him.' The Lord here, as always in Paul, is Christ, 
and is directly contrasted with His most distinguished 
servants. It is in the same spirit that the apostle ex- 
claims, 'Was Paul crucified for you? or were you bap- 
tized in the name of Paul?' The idea which he here 
takes for granted is that the name of Jesus is an incom- 
parable, incommensurable name. We can compare Paul 
and Apollos if we please; we can say that one planted and 
the other watered, though the apostle does not look 
on the making of such comparisons as a very profitable 
employment. But we must not compare Paul and Christ. 
They are not, like Paul and Apollos, members of one 
class by the ideal of which they can be judged. They 
are not teachers of religion, whether in rivalry or in part- 
nership, who can equally be criticised through the idea 
of what religious teaching ought to be. This view is 
quite common in modern times even among men who 
profess to preach the Christian religion, but it is not the 
view of Paul. The very idea of it shocked him. His 
own relation to the Church, or that of Apollos, was in 
no way analogous to that of Christ. No doubt if he 
and Apollos had refused or renounced Christianity, the 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 25 

Church would have missed them, but their places could 
have been supplied. The Church would have been 
there though they had been wanting, and the Lord who 
Himself gives the apostles and prophets and evangelists 
would have raised up others for His work. But without 
Christ there would be no Cnurch, and no ministry at all; 
everything that we call Christian is absolutely dependent 
on Him. From this side, again, therefore, we see the 
unique place which Christ filled in the faith of Paul. 

This exclusive and divine significance of Christ is even 
more conspicuous when we look at the two great religious 
controversies which engaged the apostle's mind in his 
earlier and later years, and brought his faith to articulate 
and conscious expression. The first is that which has left 
its most vivid record in the Epistle to the Galatians, and 
which is described from a greater distance and with less 
passion, perhaps less appreciation of all that was involved, 
in the fifteenth chapter of Acts. What was really at 
stake was the essence of Christianity. All who were 
Christians, Paul and his Pharisaic opponents alike, in 
some sense believed in Christ; the question was whether 
for perfect Christianity anything else was required. The 
Pharisaic Christians said Yes. The Gentile faith in 
Christ was very well as a beginning; but if these foreign 
believers were to be completely Christian and to inherit 
the blessings of the Messianic kingdom on the same foot- 
ing with them, their faith in Christ must be supplemented 
by circumcision and the keeping of the Mosaic law. Paul 
said No. Christ is the whole of Christianity — Christ 
crucified and risen. He is the whole of it on the external 
side, regarded as the revelation and action of God for the 
salvation of sinful men; and faith in Christ — ^that aban- 
donment of the soul to Him in which Paul as a Christian 
lived and moved and had his being — ^is the whole of it on 
the internal side. Anything that compromises this simple 



26 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

and absolute truth, anything that proposes to supplement 
Christ on the one side or faith on the other, is treason to 
the gospel. It strikes at the root of Christianity, at the 
absolute sufficiency of grace in God and of faith in man 
to solve the problem of salvation; it denies the glory of 
Christ and destroys the hope of sinners. This is how 
Paul conceived it, and it is this, and not any personal 
intolerance of opposition, which prompts the solemn 
vehemence of Gal. i ®: Though we, or an angel from 
heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than 
that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema. 
The interest of the words for us is the force with which 
they bring out the absolute and unshared place which 
Christ filled in the religion of Paul. His faith in Christ 
was such that it admitted of no other object; Christ com- 
pletely filled his religious horizon; his whole being, as 
a spiritual man with a life toward God, depended upon_ 
and was determined by Christ alone. And for this view, 
which he was perhaps the first to think out in clearness 
and simplicity, Paul was able to command the assent of 
the apostles who had been admitted to the intimacy 
of Jesus. James, Cephas, and John gave him and his 
fellow-worker Barnabas the right hand of fellowship. 

It is essentially the same religious question which is 
raised in another form in the second great controversy 
of the apostle's life — that to which we are introduced in 
the Epistle to the Colossians. The law appears here 
also, but the real danger now is not that of supplement- 
ing Christ by ritual observances, but that of dispensing 
with Him, to a greater or less extent, in favour of angelic 
mediators. Paul's attitude in this new situation is 
precisely what it was in Galatians. Christ is all, is the 
burden of his argument. We do not need to look any- 
where but to Him for that knowledge and presence of 
God on which salvation depends; in Him are all the 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 27 

treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden away; in Him 
dwells all the fubiess of the Godhead bodily. Once 
more it may be repeated that we are not dealing with 
the truth or falsehood of these views, with the possi- 
bihty or impossibility of justifying them, but only with 
the fact. This is how Paul unquestionably thought of 
Jesus: this is indubitably the place which Jesus filled in 
his religious life. It is not putting it too strongly to say 
that He had for Paul the religious value of God. To 
suppose that Paul could have classified Him, and put 
Him in a series along with other great men who have 
contributed to the spiritual elevation of the race, is to 
deride his sincerity and passion. In the religion of the 
apostle, Jesus held a place which no human being could 
share. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning 
and the end, the First and the Last. 

Although we are not concerned with the Christology 
of the apostle, in the strict sense of the term, but only 
with the significance which Christ had for his faith, it 
will exhibit that significance more clearly, and so con- 
tribute to our purpose, if we look at the principal ways 
in which he seems to have conceived Christ. In a sense, 
this is entering the region of doctrine rather than of faith, 
but it is not with a doctrinal purpose; what we wish is 
to see through the doctrine what Christ was in the life 
of Paul. There are three distinguishable forms in which 
Christ is present to the mind of the apostle, and in dif- 
ferent ways the same religious conclusion can be drawn 
from all. 

(i) The simplest way to conceive Christ is that which 
regards Him as an individual historical person, practi- 
cally contemporary with Paul himself; one who had 
lived and died in Palestine, and been familiarly known 
to many who were yet ahve. No doubt Paul often thought 
of Him in this light; it would be impossible for any one 



28 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

in those days to think otherwise. But there was always 
one immense quaUfication of this 'purely historical' view. 
Paul never thought of Christ, and could not think of Him, 
except as risen and exalted. Christianity may exist vdth- 
out any speculative Christology, but it never has existed 
and never can exist without faith in a living Saviour. It 
is quite possible that there was a stage in his Christian 
life when Paul had asked no theological questions about 
Jesus of Nazareth whom God had made by His exalta- 
tion both Lord and Christ. It is quite possible that he 
received the Holy Spirit and the apostolic commission 
and preached the gospel with divine power and blessing, 
before he had asked any question about the nature of 
Christ, or His original relation to God or to the human 
race, or about the mode in which the historical personality 
originated in which he now recognized the only Lord and 
Saviour. It is not his speculative Christology, if we are 
to call it such, which secures for Christ His place in Paul's 
religious life; Christ holds that place by another title, be- 
fore the speculative Christology appears. The importance 
of that Christology lies not so immediately in itself as in 
the testimony it bears to the immense stimulation of 
intelligence by the new faith. If we look, for example, 
at the Epistles to the Thessalonians, we find no trace of 
Christology in the technical sense. There is an entire 
absence of speculative construction or interpretation of 
the Person of Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ is simply 
the historical person, known to Paul's contemporaries, who 
had been put to death by the Jews, and whom God had 
raised from the dead. There is not a word about pre- 
existence, or the incarnation, or an eternal relation to 
to God, or a universal relation to men. Yet the person 
who is thus simply conceived is one on whom Christians 
are absolutely dependent; as all men live and move and 
have their being in God, so Christians live and move 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 29 

and have their being in Christ. The Church of the 
Thessalonians is a church in God the Father and the Lord 
Jesus Christ; the grace and peace which are the sum 
and the fruit of all the divine blessings it enjoys come 
to it from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ 
(i Thess. I *; 2 Thess. i^^). And this co-ordination 
of Christ with the Father, this elevation into the sphere 
of the divine in which Christ and the Father work 
harmoniously the salvation of men, is not a formal- 
ity of salutation: it pervades the epistles throughout. 
Every function of the Christian life is determined by 
it; the place of Christ in the faith and life of Christians 
can only be characterised as the place of God, not of 
man. St. Paul has confidence in the Lord toward the 
Thessalonians (11. 3 ^) ; he charges and entreats them in 
the Lord Jesus Christ (11. 3 ^^) ; they stand in the Lord 
(i. 3 ^) ; he gives them commandments through the Lord 
Jesus (i. 4 ^) ; church rulers are those who are over them 
in the Lord (i. 5 ^^) ; the Christian rule of life is the will of 
God in Christ Jesus concerning them (i. 5 ^^) ; the Chris- 
tian departed are the dead in Christ (i. 4 ^^) ; all benediction 
is summed up in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ (i. 5 2*; 
II. I ^^, 3 ^®) ; Jesus and the Father are co-ordinated as the 
object of prayer (i. 3 *^) , and prayer is directly addressed 
to the Lord, i.e. Christ (i. 3 ^^). Our Lord Jesus Christ, 
through whom we are to obtain salvation at the great 
day, is He who died for us, that whether we wake or 
sleep we should live together with Him (i. 5 ^^). It is 
as though all that God does for us He does in and through 
Christ, so that Christ confronts us as Saviour in divine 
glory and omnipotence. We may trust Him as God 
is trusted, live in Him as we live in God, and appeal 
to Him to save us as only God can save; and this is the 
essentially Christian relation to Him. It is what we 
found before in the primitive preaching of Acts; it is 



30 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

what we find in Paul when his theology is at its sim- 
plest, and where the Christology of his later epistles gives 
no indication of its presence. 

(2) The impression made upon us is not altered when 
we pass to that more developed mode of conceiving 
Christ which is characteristic of the second group of the 
apostle's writings — the controversial epistles of the third 
missionary journey, Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans. 
Of course the non-theological way of presenting Christ 
is also to be found in these, as in all Paul's letters; he 
could not but think of Him often simply as the historical 
person whom God had exalted to be Lord of all. But 
along with this there is the conception of Christ as a 
representative, typical, or universal person, who has 
for a new Christian humanity the same kind of signifi- 
cance which Adam had for the old. Sometimes it is 
the nature of this Person on which stress is laid; he is 
a spiritual man, and belongs to heaven, as opposed to 
Adam, who was a natural (psychical) man, and of the 
earth earthen (i Cor. 15 ^^ ^'). Sometimes the stress is 
laid not on his nature, but on his action^ it can be char- 
acterised by the one word obedience, as opposed to the 
disobedience or transgression of Adam; and Hke the 
disobedience of the first man, the obedience of the sec- 
ond is of universal and absolute significance. It is the 
salvation of the world (Rom. 5 ^^ ^•). This is the con- 
ception which lends itself most readily to what are usu- 
ally called 'mystical' interpretations of Christ's life and 
work. What is most important in it is the truth which 
it embodies of the kinship of Christ with all mankind, 
and the progressive verification of that truth which comes 
with the universal preaching of the gospel. Paul was 
convinced of the representative character of Christ and 
of all His acts; the death that He died for all has some- 
how the significance that the death of all would itself 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 31 

have; in His resurrection we see the first fruits of a new 
race which shall wear the image of the heavenly man. 
It may indeed be said that any man is kin to all humanity, 
but not any man is kin in such a sense that men of all 
races can find their centre and rallying-point in Him. 
The progress of Christian missions is the demonstration 
in point of fact that Christ is the second Adam, and while 
His true humanity is asserted in this, as it is taken for 
granted everywhere in the New Testament, it leaves Him 
still in a place which is His alone. When Paul thinks 
of Christ as the second Adam, he does not reduce Him 
to the level of common humanity, as if He were only one 
more in the mass; on the contrary, the mass is conceived 
as absorbed and summed up in Him. It is not a way of 
denying, it is one way more of asserting, His peculiar place. 
(3) The same may be said with even greater confi- 
dence of Christ as He is presented to us in the later 
Epistle to the Colossians.* We have here to do not with 
a historical individual whom God has exalted — not with 
a representative or universal person who is Man rather 
than one particular man — but with a person who can 
only be characterised as eternal and divine. When Jesus 
is represented as the Christ, it is as though He were 
explained by reference to the history of Israel; as the 
second Adam, he can be understood only when the 
reference is widened to take in the constitution and 
fortunes of the whole human race; but in the later mind 
of Paul there is something more profound and far-reach- 
ing than either. It is not possible to do justice to Jesus 
until we realise that in Him we are in contact with the 
eternal truth and being of God. This is the burden 
of the Epistle to the Colossians. What comes to us and 
acts upon us in Christ is nothing less than the eternal 
truth of God's being and character; it is not adequately 

•See also iCor. 8«. 



32 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

explained by thinking of Israel or by thinking of humanity, 
but only by thinking of God. The Jesus Christ of the 
apostle's faith was indeed an Israelite after the flesh; 
He was true and complete man, born of a woman; but 
the ultimate truth about Him is that in Him dwells all 
the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and that we are com- 
plete in Him. There is not anything that can be under- 
stood if its relation to Him is ignored. All that we call 
being, and all that we call redemption, must be referred 
to Him alone; this is the divine way to comprehend it. 
In Him were all things created, and it pleased the Father 
through Him to reconcile all things to Himself (Col. i 
and 2). 

These are overwhelming ideas when we think of Jesus 
of Nazareth, a Galilean carpenter, who had not where to 
lay His head, and reflect that they have to be associated 
with Him. The intellectual daring of them is almost 
inconceivable; imagination fails to realise the pressure 
under which the mind must have been working when it 
rose to the height of such assertions. Yet the serious- 
ness and passion of the apostle are unquestionable, and 
the writer can only express his conviction that the at- 
tempts made to explain what may be called the Christ- 
ology of Colossians by reference to Philo are essentially 
beside the mark. At the utmost, they help us to under- 
stand a casual expression here and there in Paul; they 
contribute nothing to the substance of his thought. 
Christ was not a lay figure that Paul could drape as 
he chose in the finery of Palestinian apocalyptic or of 
Alexandrian philosophy. He was the living Lord and 
Saviour, and if we can be sure of anything it is that in 
what the apostle says of Him there is nothing merely 
formal, nothing which has the character of literary or 
speculative borrowing, but that everything rests on ex- 
perience. If Christ had been to Paul only a name in 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 33 

a book, a name which he might use as a philosophic 
symbol or plaything, we might set a higher value upon 
the Philonic or other explanations which are sometimes 
offered of the Christology of the Epistle to the Colos- 
sians; but when we consider what Christ really was to 
the apostle, such explanations become meaningless. 
Paul was not a philosopher like Philo, baffled by the 
difficulty of connecting the spiritual God and the mate- 
rial universe, and finding the solution of his ever-recur- 
ring problem in the idea of the Logos, an idea which in 
some imexplained, not to say incomprehensible, way he 
was led to identify with Christ. The relation of God to 
the world had no more difficulty for him than for Amos 
or Isaiah; the God in whom he believed was not the 
philosophical abstraction of Philo, but the living God of 
the Bible, who made the world and who acted in it as 
He pleased. Paul did not transfer to Christ the attri- 
butes of the Logos, he did not make Him divine or half- 
divine, that he might provide an answer to speculative 
difficulties about the relation of God to the world of 
matter. The process in his mind was the very reverse. 
He was conscious in his experience as a Christian that 
what he came in contact with in Christ was nothing less 
than the eternal truth and love of God; it was the very 
reality which God is, the revelation of His eternal being 
in a human person, the fulness of the Godhead bodily 
(Col. 2®). It does not matter whether 'bodily' means 
* incarnate as man,' or *in organic unity and complete- 
ness' as opposed to partial or imperfect revelation. The 
point is that Paul was conscious of meeting God in Christ. 
Here, he felt, he touched the last reahty in the universe, 
the ens realissimunij the ultimate truth through which 
aad by relation to which all things must be defined and 
understood. Paul does not, in writing to the Colos- 
sians, invest Christ in a character and greatness which 
3 



34 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

have no relation to His true nature, merely to stop a 
hole in his philosophy. On the contrary, the presence of 
God in Christ — ^His presence in the eternal truth of His 
being and character — is for Paul the primary certainty; 
and that certainty carries with it for him the requirement 
of a specifically Christian view of the universe. He 
would not be true to Christ, as Christ had revealed 
Himself to him in experience, unless he had the courage 
to Christianise all his thoughts of God, and the world. 
And this is what he is doing in the Epistle to the Colos- 
sians. He is not directly deifying Christ, he is Christi- 
anising the universe. He is not exhibiting Christ as 
divine or quasi-divine, by investing Him in the waver- 
ing and uncertain glories of the Alexandrian Logos; he 
is casting upon all creation and redemption the steadfast 
and unwavering light of that divine presence of which 
he was assured in Christ, and for which the Alexandrians 
had groped in vain. There is nothing in Paul more 
original, nothing in which his mind is more profoundly 
stimulated and his faith in Christ more vitally active, 
than the Epistle to the Colossians; and no greater in- 
justice could be done him than to explain the signifi- 
cance which he here assigns to Christ by pointing to the 
alien and formal influence of a feeble dualistic philosophy, 
or to strike out of the epistle, as some would do, the 
very sentences which are the key to the whole.* If there 
is anything in Paul's writings which is his very own, born 
of his own experience, his own reflection, the necessities 
of his own thought, it is the conception of Christ as an 
eternal or divine person characteristic of this epistle. 

Here again, therefore, we find our previous observa- 
tion of the New Testament confirmed. Christ has a 
place in the faith of Christians which is without parallel 
elsewhere. But while we must not fail to recognise this, 

^See Von Soden, Hand Commentary iii. 32 f. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 35 

we need not misunderstand it. It is misunderstood, for 
example, by Wernle when he says that the consciousness 
of God must have been weakened in Paul before he 
could have said of Christ the things which he says in Co- 
lossians/ Christ, in other words, practically displaces God 
in this epistle; the Jewish sneer is almost justified which 
represents Christians as teaching that there is no God, 
but that Jesus is His Son. But Christ does not displace 
God; it is in Christ alone that Paul gets that assurance 
of God, and of his eternal truth and love, in which he 
lives, and in the light of which he cannot but interpret 
all things. Nothing that he says justifies the Jewish 
sneer: what it does justify is the truly evangelical re- 
mark of Dr. Chalmers — 'I find that without a hold of 
Christ there is no hold of God at all.'^ In truth, what 
we have in Colossians is only another assertion of the 
absolute significance of Christ for Christian faith. It is 
consciously pursued, no doubt, in its consequences further 
than elsewhere, but it is the same thing. A person of 
absolute significance — an eternal person — a person to 
whom in one way or another the idea of finality attaches: 
all these are indistinguishable. If we say that Christ is 
the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, we 
represent His absolute significance in one way; it is 
eternity for the imagination. If we say that He is the 
final Judge of all, on whose decision their destiny depends, 
we represent His absolute significance in another way; 
it is eternity for the conscience. But imagination and 
conscience have not rights in human nature which can 
be denied to the intelligence or speculative faculty; and 
it is to this last, and not merely to imagination and con- 
science, that Paul interprets in Colossians the abso- 

^Die Anfange unserer Religion, 205: 'Die paulinische Gnosis geht 
hier von einem sehr lebendigen Gefiihl des Christlichen aus, aber 
zugleich von einem ganzlich toten Gottesbegriff.' 

^Hanna's Life, ii. 448. 



36 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

lute significance of the Lord. It is not our business at 
this point to consider whether or not he can be justified 
in doing so by appeal to Jesus Himself, but it seemed 
necessary to say what has been said because the question 
of justification cannot be fairly raised until there is agree- 
ment upon what he has actually done. 

In several passages of Paul's writings there is a con- 
ception of Christ which to most readers will seem akin 
to that which we have been discussing, but which is in 
truth much more difficult to apprehend — the conception 
of Him as pre-existent. The one difficulty which haunts 
theological thinking everywhere, the difficulty or rather 
the impossibility of defining the relation of time to eter- 
nity, is peculiarly felt here. Is an eternal person rightly 
or adequately thought of as a person existing before 
all things, or is the idea of pre-existence an imperfect 
means of representing eternity in the form of time — 
an idea, therefore, which is bound to lead to inconsist- 
encies and contradictions? When Paul speaks of the 
pre-existence of Christ, is he carrying out in this in- 
adequate form his own conviction, based on experience, 
that Christ is a person in whom the eternal truth of 
God has come into the world, and who, therefore, be- 
longs to God's eternal being? Or is he simply applying 
to Him the common Jewish belief that the Messiah 
existed with God before He appeared among men? It 
is not easy to say: even if we admit the inadequacy of 
an idea like pre-existence to represent the eternal sig- 
nificance of Christ, and see no reason to doubt that cur- 
rent Jewish beliefs made this inadequate representation 
easier to the apostle, we must admit that in the most 
characteristic passages in which he uses it (2 Cor. 8 ®; 
Phil. 2 ^ ^•) it has been thoroughly Christianised. Judged 
by the Christian knowledge of God's revelation in Christ, 
the act by which the eternal person, conceived as pre- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF PAUL 37 

existent, enters into the world of time, is a characteris- 
tically divine act. It is one in which the eternal truth 
of the divine nature — that God's name is Redeemer 
from of old, and that He humbles Himself to bear us 
and our burdens (Isa. 63^®; Ps. 68^^) — is conspicu- 
ously revealed. In itself, the idea of pre-existence is 
harder to understand and to appreciate than that of 
eternal reality and worth; but even those who find it, 
abstractly considered, least congenial, must admit that 
in its Pauline applications it is in thorough harmony 
with the mind of Christ. Our interest in it here, how- 
ever, need not carry us further; its application to Christ, 
and to Him alone, is only a final indication of the in- 
comparable place He 611s in the faith of Paul. 

What has now been said is conclusive, and yet it 
makes practically no reference to the one signal proof 
Paul's writings afford of the unique and incommunicable 
place Christ held in his faith. That proof is afforded by 
what the apostle teaches of the meaning and power of 
Christ's death. This is not the place to enter into an 
exposition of this: it is sufficient to refer to the fact. 
He died for us, that whether we wake or sleep we might 
live together with Him (i Thess. 5 *^). Paul delivers to 
men first of all that Christ died for our sins, according to 
the Scriptures; this is the divinely laid foundation of 
the gospel (i Cor. 15^). He died for all, so then all 
died— their death was somehow involved and compre- 
hended in His; Him, who knew^ no sin, God made to 
be sin on our behalf, that we might be made the right- 
eousness of God in Him (2 Cor, $ ""^^). In His cruci- 
fixion He became a curse for us (Gal. 3 *^). God set 
Him forth as a propitiation, through faith, in His blood; 
when w^e were enemies we were reconciled to God by 
the death of His Son (Rom. 3 ^^ 5 ^^). In Him we have 
our redemption, through His blood, even the forgiveness 



38 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

of our trespasses (Eph. i '). So it runs through the 
epistles from beginning to end. There is no other person 
of whom such things can be said, or who can claim even 
to have some part of them extended to him when they 
are said of Christ. They are all for Him and for Him 
alone. They make it impossible to dispute the fact that 
Christ held a unique place in Paul's faith, and they make 
us feel deeply that this unique place was held hy Christ 
in virtue of something which made Paul infinitely his 
debtor. 

What has now been said hardly needs to be sum- 
marised. Whether the apostle was right or wrong; 
whether he was impelled by his experience as a Chris- 
tian, or prompted by reminiscences of pre-Christian, 
Messianic theology, and extra-Christian Alexandrian 
philosophy, there is no doubt about the place he gave 
to Christ. Look at it as we will, it was a place which 
no man could share. Christ determined everything in 
the relations of God and men; but this, though it is 
central, is only the starting-point. All things whatso- 
ever have to be determined by relation to Him; in Him 
alone is the key to their meaning to be found. All na- 
ture, all history, all revelation and redemption, all that 
is human and all that is divine, can be understood only 
through Him. The universe has to be reconstituted 
with Him as its centre, the principle of its unity, its goal. 
To understand the world is to discover that it is a Chris- 
tian world — that spiritual law, the very law in which 
Christ lived and died — ^pervades the constitution of nature 
and the history of man. There is not in the history 
of the human mind an instance of intellectual boldness 
to compare with this, and it is the supreme daring of it 
which convinces us that it is the native birth of Paul's 
Christian faith. No one ever soared so high on bor- 
rowed wings. 



THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN HEBREWS 39 
III 

CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS 

When we pass from Paul, it is open to us, in view of 
the chronological and other uncertainties regarding the 
books of the New Testament, to take them in almost 
any order. The Epistle to the Hebrews, while it has 
affinities with almost all types of Christian thought — 
with the synoptic gospels and the early chapters of Acts, 
with Paul and with the Judaism of Alexandria — never- 
theless stands alone in the New Testament. It is the 
most solitary of the primitive Christian books. In its 
presentation of Christ we might almost say that extremes 
meet. On the one hand, it is the most humanitarian of 
apostolic writings. It speaks with a kind of predilection 
of Jesus, not the Christ; it recalls 'the days of His flesh,' 
when, with strong crying and tears, He offered prayers 
and supplications to Him that was able to save Him 
from death, and was heard because of His godly fear; 
it holds Him up to us as a pattern of faith, the ideal 
subject of rehgion, who was tempted in all things like 
as we are, yet without sin; who passed through a cur- 
riculum of suffering by which He was made perfect for His 
calling, and who learned in doing so what it is to obey; 
who lived the life of faith in God from beginning to end, 
and is in short the typical believer. All this touches 
the heart of the reader as it no doubt moved the writer 
of the epistle, but it does not disclose to us the full sig- 
nificance of Jesus for His own faith. The most humani- 
tarian book of the New Testament can also be fairly 
described as the most theological. Jesus is not only 
the pattern of true piety, but everything in the rela- 
tions of God and men is determined by Him, He is 



40 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

the mediator of a new covenant; to Him we owe the 
bringing in of a better hope through which we draw 
near to God. It is the virtue of his priesthood and 
sacrifice which consecrates us as a worshipping people, 
and by annuUing sin makes it possible for us to live in 
fellowship with the most holy. The sentence with which 
the epistle opens gathers up all this and more in 
one sublime period. 'God having of old time spoken 
unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and 
in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken 
unto us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, 
through whom also He made the worlds; who being 
the effulgence of His glory, and the very image of His 
substance, and upholding all things by the word of 
His power, when He had made purification of sins, 
sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; hav- 
ing become by so much better than the angels as He 
hath inherited a more excellent name than they.' The 
absolute significance of Jesus is here presented from 
every point of view. Whether we think of God and His 
self -revelation in Israel's history, or of the final con- 
summation to which all things are tending, or of the 
creation and maintenance of the world in which we live, 
or of the atonement for sin which makes access to God 
possible for us, we must think of Christ. He is the key 
to the ultimate problems in all these regions. His place 
and worth in rehgion are incommensurable with the 
place and worth of any other beings, human or angelic: 
the final truth has been revealed; the final, because 
the perfect, rehgious relation to God has been established 
and is maintained through Him. Two of the charac- 
teristic words of the epistle serve to bring this out. One 
is * better' {xpetrrcDv), which the writer uses when he com- 
pares Christ and Christianity with other religions and 
their representative figures; the other is aiwvio?^ by which 



THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN HEBREWS 41 

he conveys the idea that Christ and Christianity are final, 
and that there is in truth no ground for comparisons. 
Thus Christ is 'better' than the angels (i^); in Chris- 
tianity there is the introduction of a 'better' hope (7 ^^); 
Jesus has become surety and mediator of a 'better' 
covenant, established upon 'better' promises (7^2^ 8^); 
the heavenly sanctuary into which He has entered with 
His own blood must be purified with 'better' sacrifices 
than the earthly (9 ^^) ; the blood of sprinkling — ^the blood 
which Jesus shed — speaks 'better' things than that of 
Abel (12 2*). This is as though the writer said to men 
attracted by the old religion, Do not bring it into com- 
parison with what we owe to Christ; it cannot stand it. 
But when he uses ai6vio<$^ eternal, to characterise the 
new dispensation in its various aspects, he means more. 
It is not only that the earlier form of religion with which 
he had to reckon is surpassed by that which looks to Jesus, 
but that the latter can never be surpassed. It is the 
eternal, final, perfect form of man's relation to God; in 
the strict sense of the term it is incomparable; and it de- 
pends for its very being on Christ, and on our faith in 
what He is and has done for us. It is in this conviction 
that he speaks of the 'eternal' salvation of which Christ is 
author to all who obey Him (5^); of the 'eternal' re- 
demption which He won by His own blood (9 ^'^) ; of 
the 'eternal' spirit — ^the final revelation of divine love 
— ^through which He offered Himself without spot to 
God (9"); of the 'eternal' inheritance promised to those 
who hear His voice (9^^); of the 'eternal' covenant es- 
tablished in His blood (13 2^). When we recognise what 
these expressions mean, we see that for the writer of 
this epistle Christ has the same absolute religious sig- 
nificance which He has for Paul. It is not possible, 
on the ground of the prominence which he gives to the 
true humanity and the genuine reUgious experience of 



42 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

Jesus, to argue that for him Jesus was only another man 
like himself, a perfect pattern of piety indeed, but no 
more; in his rehgion — ^Ln all that affected his relation 
as a sinful man to God — Jesus had a place and work 
which belonged to Him alone. All that God had done 
for the salvation of men He had done in Him; nay, all 
that He could ever do. For beyond that offering of 
Himself which Jesus had once made through the eternal 
spirit, there remains no more any sacrifice for sin (lo^®). 

IV 

CHRIST IN THE FIRST EPISTLE OF PETER 

The Catholic epistles, which were the last of the early 
Christian writings to secure a place in the canon, are 
often taken to represent an average type of Christianity, 
without the sharp edges or the individuality of view 
which we find in Paul, John, or the writer to the He- 
brews. It this were so, they might be more important 
as witnesses to the place of Jesus in Christian faith than 
the writings of the most original intellects in the Church; 
for, as Mr. Bagehot says of politics, it is the average 
man who is truly representative. But the writer cannot 
agree with this estimate of the CathoUc epistles. If 
for critical reasons we leave Second Peter out of account, 
it would be hard to imagine writings with a more dis- 
tinct stamp of individuality upon them than James, Jude, 
and John. Even the First Epistle of Peter, influenced as 
it undoubtedly is by modes of thought and turns of phrase 
which have their most characteristic expression in Paul, 
is a document which no sympathetic reader could ascribe 
to the apostle of the Gentiles. It is the work of another 
mind, a mind with distinct quaUties and virtues of its own; 
and in view of the overwhelming attestation of its author- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF FIRST PETER 43 

ship, there is no sufficient reason, either in its Pauline 
affinities or in its supposed references to one or another 
form of legalised persecution, to deny it to Peter. The 
early chapters of Acts have already shown us the place 
which Jesus held in the faith and life of His chief apostle, 
and the impression they leave is confirmed by all we find 
in the epistle. It emphasises as they do the resurrection 
of Jesus, and the expectation of His return. It calls on 
Christians to sanctify Christ as Lord in their hearts (3 ^^) , 
thus applying to Him words which in Isaiah are applied 
to Jehovah, just as Peter in Acts similarly appUes to 
Jesus words which refer to Jehovah in Joel (Acts 2 ^^). 
The new life of Christians and their hope of immortality are 
due to Christ's resurrection (i ^), and all that they know as 
redemption from sin has been accomplished by Him (i '^^^ 
2 ^' ^', 3 '^). The difficult passage extending from 3 ^® to 4 ^, 
about preaching to the spirits in prison and bringing the 
gospel to the dead, has at least thus much of undisputed 
meaning in it: there is no world, no time, no order of 
being, in which the writer can think of any other sal- 
vation than that which comes by Christ. In His uni- 
verse Christ is supreme, angels and principalities and 
powers being made subject to Him (3 ^^). In the saluta- 
tion of the epistle Christ stands side by side with the 
Father and the Spirit; and just as in Acts 2 ^^ and in 
various Pauline passages {e.g. i Cor. 12*"®, Eph. 2^^), 
the three confront man as the one divine causality on 
which salvation depends. The foreknowledge of God 
the Father, consecration wrought by the Spirit, and 
sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ, these represent 
the divine action in the salvation of men (i ^). But 
probably the most decisive expression in the epistle, as 
bringing out the significance of Jesus for the religion of 
the writer, is that which he employs in i ^^ ^- to describe 
the Christian standing of its recipients: you, he says, 



44 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

who through Him are believers in God. He does not 
mean that they did not beUeve in God before they be- 
lieved in Christ; there was true faith in God in the 
world before there was Christian faith. But although it 
was true, it was not faith in its final or adequate form: 
that is only made possible when men believe in God 
through Christ. The final faith in God owes its diffe- 
rentia, that which makes it what it is, its specific and 
characteristic qualities, to Him. The God in whom the 
Christian believes is the God who is Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, the God who gave Him up for us all, who 
raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, and 
who has called us to this eternal glory in Him. There 
could not be such faith in God, or faith in such a God, 
apart from the presence of Jesus, His atoning death, 
and His exaltation to God's right hand; it is only as we 
believe thus in Jesus that we can have the new Christian 
faith in God. Jesus is not to the writer one of us, who 
shares a faith in God which is independently acces- 
sible to all men; He is the Person to whom alone the 
Christian religion owes its character and its being; God 
would be a word of another meaning to us but for Him. 
It does not seem to go in any way beyond the truth if 
we say that with the fullest recognition of what Jesus 
was and suffered as a man upon earth, the risen Lord, 
in whom the writer beheves, stands on the divine side 
of reality, and is the channel through which all God's 
power flows to men for their salvation. 

V 

CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE OF JAMES 

The Epistle of James was long one of the cruces of 
New Testament criticism. It was regarded by many 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF JAMES 45 

and is still regarded by some as the earliest of the ca- 
nonical books; by others it is regarded as among the 
latest, if not the last of all — a writing which was only 
in time to secure admission to the canon before the door 
was shut. It says little, comparatively, about Christ, 
and the place which He fills in the life of the Christian, 
and this has been used to support both opinions about 
its age. It is argued, on the one hand, that it agrees 
with an early date at which Christological ideas were 
but little developed; and, on the other hand, that it 
agrees with a decidedly later date, when Christianity 
was thoroughly settled in the world, and was distin- 
guished by its moral temper rather than by any pecuUar 
relation to a person. It is not easy to assent to either 
argument. It is not Christological ideas which we are 
in quest of, or which the apostolic writings anywhere 
provide; and from the very earliest times, as our ex- 
amination of Peter's speeches in Acts has shown, the 
place of Christ in Christian life was central and dominant. 
In spite of the inevitable difference in an epistle which 
is not missionary nor evangelistic but disciplinary, we 
venture to hold that it is so here also. The writer in- 
troduces himself as a bond-servant of God, and of the 
Lord Jesus Christ. The co-ordination of God and Christ 
in this passage, and the choice of the term 3ovXo? to 
denote the author's relation to God and Christ, are alike 
remarkable. Again, when he wishes to describe the 
Christian religion in the most general terms, he calls it 
'the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ' (2^) — ^that is, the 
faith of which He is the object. We cannot be certain 
in this passage how the writer means us to take the 
words rrj? 86$r]?; they may be in apposition with *our 
Lord Jesus Christ,' who would then be Himself the 
glory, the manifested holiness and love of God; or, as 
the English version has it, and as seems on the whole 



46 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

more likely, they may be meant to describe our Lord 
Jesus Christ as the Lord of glory. This would emphasise 
the reference to His exaltation contained in the title Lord, 
and it has an exact parallel in i Cor. 2 ^. But in either 
case it is important to notice that the believing relation 
of Christians to the Lord Jesus Christ must determine 
everything in their conduct: whatever is inconsistent 
with it — like respect of persons — is ipso facto condemned. 
If the name of Jesus is less frequently mentioned in 
James than in other New Testament writings, there is 
none which is more pervaded by the authority of His 
word. If the Jewish Wisdom literature is present to 
the writer's mind, the tones of the sermon on the mount 
echo without ceasing in his conscience. The coming 
of the Lord is the object of all Christian hope; the de- 
mand which its delay makes for patience is the sum 
of all Christian trials (5 ''^). The name of Jesus is the 
noble name which has been invoked upon Christians 
at their baptism (2 '), and pious regard for it is a de- 
cisive Christian motive. The Lord Jesus Christ is the 
Judge who stands before the door (4 ^) , and His name is 
the resource of the Christian when confronted with sick- 
ness, sin, and death (5 ^^"^^). It ought to be noticed here 
that the true reading in 5 " is, Let them pray over him, 
anointing him with oil in the Name. Of course the 
Name meant is that of Jesus, but this did not need to 
be stated: for the writer, as for Peter and for all Chris- 
tians, there was no other name. The other examples of 
this use in the New Testament have the same signifi- 
cance. 'They departed from the presence of the council 
rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame 
for the Name' (Acts 5^^). 'For the sake of the Name 
they went forth taking nothing from the Gentiles' (3 
John, ver. 7). A writer who shares this way of think- 
ing about the name of Jesus, who calls himself in one 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF JUDE 47 

breath slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, who 
finds in the relation to Christ and His name assumed in 
baptism and described as faith the finest and most pow- 
erful motives, whose conscience has been quickened by 
the word of Jesus, and whose hope means that Jesus 
is coming to judge the world and right the wronged, can 
hardly be said to stand on a lower level of Christianity, 
whatever his date, than the other New'Testament writers. 
He may or may not have had theologising interests, though 
he found no call to exhibit them in this letter; but it 
is clear that in his religion Christ occupied the central 
and controlling place. He would not have been at home 
in any Christian society we have yet discovered if it had 
been otherwise. 



VI 

CHRIST IN THE EPISTLE OF JUDE AND IN THE 
SECOND EPISTLE OF PETER 

The close but obscure connexion of these two epistles 
justifies us in taking them together, and even if we re- 
gard them both as pseudepigraphic they are witnesses 
to the place of Jesus in the mind and life of early Chris- 
tians. If they do not tell us about Peter and Jude, they 
tell us about other people, whose faith is as much a 
matter of historical fact as that of the two apostles. 
Like James (and Paul in some of his epistles) both Jude 
and Peter announce themselves as bond-servants of Jesus 
Christ, and both introduce for the first time in their 
description of Jesus the word dsffTtdry]? which is proper 
to this relation: they speak of false teachers and bad 
men 'who deny our only Master (deffTtozT^v) and Lord 
Jesus Christ' (Jude; ver. 4), or 'who deny even the Mas- 
ter who bought them' (2 Peter 2 *). In the first of these 



48 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

passages it has been questioned whether two persons 
are not meant: does not 'our only Master,' it is said, 
signify God, in distinction from ' our Lord Jesus Christ ' ? 
The same question is raised again in 2 Peter i^, where 
it is open to discussion whether the writer speaks of *the 
righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ' 
(one person, as it is rendered in the Revised Version), 
or of 'the righteousness of our God, and the Saviour 
Jesus Christ' (two persons, as in margin of Revised 
Version). The difficulty is the same as in Titus 2 ^^, 
where the text of the Revised Version has 'the glory of 
our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ' (one person), 
and the margin, 'the glory of the great God, and our 
Saviour Jesus Christ' (two persons). Strict grammar 
favours the rendering according to which there is only 
one person mentioned in all these places, Jesus Christ, who 
is called ' our only Master and Lord,' and ' our great God 
and Saviour.' There are cases, however, in which strict 
grammar is misleading, and these may be among them. 
It is awkward to call Jesus Christ 'our God and Saviour' 
in 2 Peter i ^ and then to speak in the very next sentence 
of the knowledge of ' God, and of Jesus our Lord.' Dr. 
Moulton thinks that 'familiarity with the everlasting 
apotheosis that flaunts itself in the papyri and inscrip- 
tions of Ptolemaic and Imperial times lends strong sup- 
port to Wendland's contention that Christians, from the 
latter part of the first century onward, deliberately an- 
nexed for their Divine Master the phraseology that was 
impiously arrogated to themselves by some of the worst 
of men.'^ A writer like Jude, however, who is conscious 
of sustaining a tradition, and exhorts his readers to 
contend earnestly for the faith once for all delivered 
to the saints, would hardly have described Jesus as the 
only dsa7z6Tri<s and xbpto<s merely under constraint from 

^ Grammar of New Testament Greek, i. 84. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF SECOND PETER 49 

the impieties of emperor worship. His divine greatness 
is reaUsed on independent grounds and represented in 
independent ways. It is conspicuous in the two pas- 
sages which always redeem Jude in the common Chris- 
tian mind from the reproach of quoting Enoch. One is 
the subhme doxology in vv. 24, 25, in which glory, maj- 
esty, dominion and power are ascribed 'to the only 
wise God our Saviour through Jesus Christ our Lord': 
it is this mediation of Christ in Christian worship in 
which His final significance for faith is expressed. The 
other is the equally sublime exhortation of v. 20: 'But 
ye, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, 
praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love 
of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ 
unto eternal life.' Here as in so many other passages 
we are confronted with the Holy Spirit, God, and our 
Lord Jesus Christ as the total manifestation of that 
on which our salvation depends. It is in the same region 
as that in which God and His Spirit work that our Lord 
Jesus Christ works; it is to that side of reality that He 
belongs; the whole religious life of men is divinely deter- 
mined by Him as it could not be by any other; this is 
His permanent and incomparable place in the faith and 
life of Christians. 

It is not necessary to look for peculiarities which dis- 
tinguish 2nd Peter from Jude: its dependence can hardly 
be questioned. It is enough to remark that the writer 
has a strong partiality for those full descriptions which 
bring out the importance of Christ to the Christian 
mind; he speaks three times of 'our Lord Jesus Christ,' 
three times again of ' our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,' 
and once of ' the apostles of our Lord and Saviour.' This 
fulness does not strike one in reading as an orthodox 
formalism, but rather conveys a deep sense, on the part 
of the writer, of the superhuman greatness of the per- 
4 



50 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

son Ox whom he speaks. It is the oldest, it might be 
said the only, doctrine of revealed religion, that salvation 
belongs to the Lord; and when Jesus is habitually con- 
fessed as Lord and Saviour, His significance for Christian 
faith is absolute and divine. 



VII 

CHRIST IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS 

When we come to the synoptic gospels, we are con- 
fronted with difficulties of a new kind. The synoptic 
gospels contain not only the testimony of the writers to 
Jesus, but also (through that testimony) the testimony 
of Jesus to Himself. It is certain that the writers of 
the gospels drew no clear and conscious distinction be- 
tween these two things, and could not have conceived 
that one of them should ever be used to discredit the 
other. They never thought that the place which Jesus 
had in their faith was anything else than the place which 
belonged to Him, and was truly and rightly His: they 
never thought they were giving Him what was not His 
due, or what He had not really claimed: the distinc- 
tion between the religion in which they lived and the 
historical support which could be asserted for it in the 
personality and life of Jesus was one which had no formal 
existence for them. This may be said quite confidently 
in spite of all that we hear about the 'apologetic' motives 
which are alleged to account for so much of what we 
read in our gospels. Jesus, we are told, had such and 
such a character or value in the faith of His disciples, 
and in order to justify this character there must be such 
and such words or deeds or events in His life. If they 
were not supplied in tradition rhey were produced more 



•CHRIST IN THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS 51 

or less spontaneously by the Christian consciousness 
or imagination. There was no sin in this, no intent 
to deceive either others or oneself; Christ must have 
said or done such and such things, and of course, there- 
fore, He did say and do them. He is represented in 
our gospels as so saying and doing them, and that is 
why it is so difficult to use the gospels simply as historical 
documents. Their writers have no independent his- 
torical interest, and what. they give us is not the repre- 
sentation of Christ as He really was, but Christ as to 
them He must have been, Christ transj&gured in the 
luminous haze of faith. The task of the historian is 
to dissipate the haze, to see Jesus as He really was, to 
reduce Him to the historic proportions in which alone 
He can have lived and moved among men. To faith 
it may be an ungrateful task, in performing which it 
is impossible to avoid wounding the tenderest feelings; 
yet faith in God can have no interest superior to that 
of truth, and ought to be confident that whatever it may 
lose in the process the end can be nothing but gain. 

At the point which we have now reached in our dis- 
cussion it is necessary to have the possibilities here in- 
dicated in view, but the critical appreciation of them 
will come later. It will be sufficient for our present 
purpose to say that while everything that we find in an 
evangelist concerning Jesus — including all that is said 
and done by Jesus Himself — must be taken into account 
in reproducing that evangehst's reUgion, we shall here 
confine our attention to that minimum of matter in which 
the mind of the evangelist can be clearly distinguished 
from that of his subject. There are characteristics in 
Mark, in Matthew, and in Luke which belong to each 
in particular, and in these, though not in these only, we 
have a clue to what we seek. 



52 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

(a) The Gospel according to Mark 

The oldest of our gospels has a title: ' the beginning 
of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Son of God).' It can 
hardly be doubted that the author uses the term gospel 
in the sense of the apostolic church. Luke does not use 
it at all, and Matthew never without qualification (see 
Matt. 4 ^^ 9 ^^ 24 ^\ 26 ^^) ; but Mark has it six times with- 
out any qualification, and in two others he has 'the gospel 
of God' (i"), indicating its author, and 'the gospel of 
Jesus Christ' (i ^), indicating its subject. He does not 
call his book a gospel, but to present Jesus as He is pre- 
sented in this book is to preach the gospel, or at least to 
exhibit, as Mark understood them, the facts on the basis 
of which the gospel was preached. For him Jesus is not 
so much a preacher of the gospel, though he says that 
He came proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying 
'Repent and beheve in the gospel'; He is the subject of 
the gospel and its contents. He is not the first of a 
series of messengers who all came with the same message, 
and w^ere all related to it in the same way; the message 
itself which is called gospel is embodied in Him, and the 
only way to deliver it is to make Him visible. This is 
implied in the very use of the term gospel, and it is suf- 
ficient to put Mark, as a witness to the place of Jesus 
in Christianity, in line with those whose testimony we 
have already examined. Whatever his Christology may 
be, Jesus has a place in his religion to which there is no 
analogy. The gospel is the gospel of Jesus Christ as it 
is not the gospel of any other. Could Mark, or can we, 
conceive any other figure sharing in the place and the 
religious significance of Jesus as they are presented to 
us in his brief and vivid record? 

Mark, as his title shows, conceived Jesus as the Christ. 
What this means has been explained already in the 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF MARK 53 

section on primitive Christian preaching. It means that 
he thought of Jesus while he wrote as exalted at God's 
right hand, and ready to come again and to establish 
the Kingdom of God with power. But the present 
exaltation of Jesus is not unrelated to his past. The 
character or dignity or function of the Christ attached to 
Jesus while He was on earth, though it was known at 
first only to Himself, and though it only came to be 
apprehended, fitfully and uncertainly, even by those who 
knew Him best. This has indeed been disputed and 
denied in recent times. An acute but unbalanced German 
scholar, the late Professor Wrede of Breslau, argued 
that no one ever thought of Jesus as the Christ till after 
the resurrection, and that many of the difficulties and 
obscurities in the Gospel of Mark are due to the evan- 
gelist's efforts to carry back into the career of Jesus upon 
earth this conception of Messiahship which is applicable 
only to the Risen Lord. This, again, we do not need 
to consider here. Whether he was justified or not in 
doing so, it is certain that the evangelist does carry back 
the conception of the Christ into the lifetime of Jesus; 
he represents Peter confessing Him to be the Christ, 
and Jesus accepting the confession, and making it the 
starting-point for teaching those truths about Himself 
and His work which peculiarly constituted ' the gospel.' 
As Wellhausen has pointed out, there is a whole section 
of the Gospel according to Mark, that which extends 
from Peter's confession (8 2') to Jesus' reply to the am- 
bitious request of the sons of Zebedee (10^^), which 
has a peculiarly 'Christian' character. It is concerned 
very much with the doctrine of the suffering Christ, the 
Son of Man, who has come to give His life a ransom for 
many, and who after His death will come again in the 
glory of His Father with the holy angels; and whatever 
its historic relation to Jesus, it certainly embodies the 



54 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

convictions of Mark as to the place of Jesus in religion. 
Apart from this, we are not able to say much. Mark 
never refers to any fulfilment of prophecy in the life of 
Jesus, as proving or illuminating His Messianic character; 
the textual difficulties connected vi^ith the quotation of 
Malachi and Isaiah in chap, i ^^" make it quite probable 
that these verses were inserted by another hand. It is 
more plausible to argue that he thought of the mighty 
works which he records, works in the main of healing 
love, as appropriate to the Messianic character; this at 
least would be in keeping with the line of thought taken 
in Acts 2 ^^, lo ^^ by Peter, with whose name the Gos- 
pel of Mark is connected in the earliest tradition. In 
His baptism, Jesus was anointed with Holy Spirit and 
power, and the manifestations of that power in His life- 
time were indications of what He was. The words * Son 
of God ' in Mark i * are of doubtful authenticity, and we 
cannot argue from them. Where they stand, they are 
probably meant to be taken as synonymous with Christ 
or Messiah. As far as we can see, it is in His baptism 
with the Holy Spirit that Jesus, as Mark understood it, 
became the Christ, the Son of God. From that hour He 
was all that in the faith and experience of Christians He 
ever came to be. But He could not tell what He was 
as one can impart a piece of indifferent information to 
another. He had to reveal Himself as what He was, 
in life and word and works; He had to be discovered 
as what He was by men who associated with Him in 
obedience, trust, and love. The truncated form in which 
the gospel has come to us, with no resurrection scene, 
and no words of the Risen Lord, prevents us from seeing 
as directly in Mark, as we do in the other evangelists, 
the full scope of the writer's faith. But we have seen 
what he means by the term gospel, and we know from 
words which he ascribes to Jesus that he believed the 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF MATTHEW 55 

gospel to be meant for all mankind (13 ^*', 14 ®). Jesus 
exalted as Lord and Saviour of all, the Jesus whom the 
evangeUst can exhibit to us in this character even in the 
days of His flesh, is the same incomparable and incom- 
mensurable person whom we have met everywhere in 
New Testament religion. 

(6) The Gospel according to Matthew 

In the Gospel according to Matthew it is much easier 
to distinguish the author from the subject, for there 
is much more which belongs to the author alone. The 
first two chapters have no parallel in the earlier gos- 
pel narrative, and they show us at once the peculiar 
place which Jesus held in the evangelist's faith. Like 
all New Testament writers he conceives Jesus as the 
Christ. Whether 'the book of the generation' (i ^) refers 
to the genealogy and the stories of the birth only, or 
to the narrative as a whole, it is concerned with Jesus 
as Messiah, son of David, son of Abraham. The idea 
underlying the genealogy is that the history of Israel, 
which means the history of God's gracious dealing with 
the human race, is consummated in Jesus. He is the 
ideal Son of David to whom it all looks forward, and it 
is in Him that all the promises made by God to the 
fathers are to be fulfilled. The characteristic of the 
Gospel according to Matthew, or perhaps we should 
rather say the characteristic interest of the author, is seen 
in his continual reference to Scriptures which have been 
fulfilled in Jesus. The proof from prophecy that Jesus 
is the Messiah preoccupies him from beginning to end: 
*that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the Lord 
through the prophet' runs through his work like a re- 
frain. It is quite true that many of his proofs are to 
us unconvincing. We can see no rehgious and no in- 



56 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

tellectual value in references like those in Matthew 2 *® 
to Hosea, or Matthew 2 ^® to Jeremiah. We do not 
think of a Messianic programme, set out beforehand in 
the Old Testament, and carried through by Jesus, with 
precise correspondence, from point to point; corre- 
spondence, we feel, is one thing, and fulfilment another. 
But this only means that the form through which the 
evangelist expresses his conviction about Jesus is in- 
adequate to the truth in his mind. What he is assured 
of is that the whole divine intention which pervades the 
ancient revelation has been consummated at last, and 
that the consummation is Jesus. The argument from 
prophecy that Jesus is the Christ is not for us an argu- 
ment that this or that detail in the life of Jesus answers 
to this or that phrase in the Hebrew Scriptures; it is 
the argument that the Old Testament and the New 
are one and continuous, and that what God is prepar- 
ing in the one He has achieved in the other. Imperfect 
as is the form in which this is occasionally conveyed by the 
evangelist, it cannot be doubted that this is substan- 
tially his thought. The unity of the Old Testament 
and the New, which makes Jesus the centre and the 
key to God's purposes, was the core of the evangelist's 
religious convictions, and it is in harmony with the place 
assigned to Jesus in the common faith. 

In speaking of the title of St. Mark^s Gospel — 'the 
beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ (Son of God) ' — 
it has been remarked that the bracketed words, which 
are of doubtful genuineness, are probably to be taken as 
synonymous with the Christ. Though this is probable, 
however, it is by no means certain. It is quite possible, 
if Mark wrote these words, that he understood them as 
Paul would have done; and that though the narrative 
part of his gospel, which is included in the limits set in 
Acts I ^^ ^-j represents the. Divine Sonship of Jesus as in a 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF MATTHEW 57 

peculiar way connected with His baptism, Mark may 
have conceived it in a higher and independent sense. 
In view of the fact that the consciousness of Divine Son- 
ship — in other words, of the Fatherhood of God — ^is the 
characteristic mark of the Christian rehgion, the very 
God whom Christians worship being the God who is 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, it has always seemed 
to the writer difficult to believe that Son of God when 
applied by Christians to Jesus meant nothing but Mes- 
siah. It must have taken an effort of which Christians 
were incapable to evacuate the title of everything filial 
in the Christian sense, of everything which went to con- 
stitute their own religious consciousness, while yet that 
consciousness owed its very being to the Divine Son- 
ship of Jesus. But be the case as it may with Mark, 
it is certain that to Matthew the Son of God is more 
than the Messianic King. It would be inappropriate to 
refer here to words which the evangelist records as spoken 
by Jesus; such words will come up for consideration at 
a later stage. It is enough to recall the story of the birth 
of the Christ. The evangelist sees in it the fulfilment 
of the prophecy of Isaiah: Behold the virgin shall be 
with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall 
call his name Immanuel. Attention has usually been 
concentrated here on the supernatural mode in which 
Jesus entered the world; but if we wish to see the place 
he held in the religion of the evangelist, and of those 
for whom he wrote, the most important word is the 
name of the child. Immanuel, which is, being inter- 
preted, God with US', it is here his significance Hes. 
The Divine Sonship is something more than is declared 
with power in the resurrection; it is something more 
than is revealed to Jesus Himself in the baptism; it is 
something essential to this person, something which 
enters into the very constitution of His being, which 



58 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

connects Him immediately with God, and makes His 
presence with us the guarantee and the equivalent of the 
presence of God Himself. This, at least, is how the 
evangelist conceived it, and nothing could show more 
clearly the place which Jesus filled in his faith. Of 
necessity it is a place in which He can have neither 
rival nor partner. As God with us, Jesus is protected 
by the same jealousy which says. Thou shalt have no 
other Gods before me. In everything that concerns our 
religious life, our relations to God, we must be deter- 
mined by Him alone. 

There is another point in his narrative at which the 
peculiarities of Matthew's gospel may be supposed to 
throw light on the religious value which he ascribed to 
Jesus. It is that at which Peter makes the confession 
of Jesus' Messiahship at Csesarea Philippi. In Mark's 
version Jesus asks simply, Whom say ye that I am? and 
Peter answers as simply, Thou art the Christ. In Mat- 
thew both the question and the answer are significantly 
expanded. The question becomes. Who do men say 
that the Son of Man is? and the answer. Thou art 
the Christ, the Son of the living God. The balancing of 
the Son of Man and the Son of the living God is re- 
markable. Possibly there is the germ in it of what 
came centuries afterwards to be known as the doctrine 
of the two distinct natures, divine and human, in the one 
person of the Saviour; but even if such precise theo- 
logical definition were far from the evangelist's thoughts, 
we feel that the person so solemnly and sublimely de- 
scribed is one who stands quite alone. In a way of which 
we cannot but be sensible, though we may not be able 
to explain it, He is related to God and to man, and has 
a significance for God and for man which cannot be 
shared. To think of Him as a person who can be put 
into His place among the distinguished servants of God 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF MATTHEW 59 

who from time to time appear in the world to animate 
and bless their weaker fellows — as *a prophet, or one 
of the prophets' — is not to think of Him as Matthew 
does. 

The place which Jesus occupied in the faith of Matthew 
is, however, seen most conspicuously and unambiguously 
in his account of the appearance of the Risen Saviour to 
the eleven. Those who will not regard as historical the 
words ascribed to Jesus on this occasion are all the more 
bound to look at them, as they usually do, as expressing 
the evangelist's own faith. Jesus is exalted as Lord of all. 
He has all power given to Him in heaven and on earth. 
He commissions His disciples, in virtue of this exalta- 
tion, to go and make all nations His disciples, baptizing 
them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things whatso- 
ever He had commanded; and He promises them His 
abiding presence to the end of the world. Granting for 
the moment that what we hear in this place is not so 
much the historical voice of Jesus as the voice of the 
Catholic Church telling itself through the evangelist what 
it has realised Jesus to be, there can be no mistake about 
the place in which it sets Him. He shares the throne of 
God, and there is no power in heaven or on earth which 
can dispute with His. He is destined to a universal 
sovereignty in grace, and sends His chosen witnesses to 
make disciples of all the nations. Baptism, the initiatory 
rite of the new religious community, is baptism in the 
name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; its 
value is that when men accept it in penitence and faith 
it brings their life into vital relation to that name; all 
that is signified by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit becomes 
theirs; the benediction, inspiration, and protection of this 
holy name enter into and cover all their life. But here, 
as we have often had occasion to remark already, the Son 



6o JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

stands in the same line with the Father and the Spirit, 
confronting all nations. He belongs to the Divine as 
contrasted with the human side in religious experience. 
That He was truly human it could never have occurred to 
the evangelist to doubt; but just as little could it have oc- 
curred to him to think that He was merely human, another 
child of the same race, to whom we are related precisely 
as we are to each other. Jesus as Matthew sees Him and 
exhibits Him at last is the Lord — the Lord who is exalted 
in divine power and glory, and who is perpetually present 
with His own. 

How far this conception of Jesus modified the presenta- 
tion of His life in the gospel, or whether it modified it at 
all, are questions reserved for the present: what we are 
concerned to note is that His place in the faith of the 
evangelist is that which is assigned Him in New Testa- 
ment faith in general. The facts may or may not be able 
to support His greatness, but this greatness is what they 
are asked to support. 

(c) The Gospel according to Luke 

In the third gospel it is easier even than in Matthew 
to point out the characteristics of the writer's faith. 
They are conspicuous alike in what he tells of the birth 
of Jesus, and of His intercourse with the disciples after 
the resurrection. Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; 
and the evangeUst does not leave us in any doubt as to 
what these epithets mean. He does, indeed, in the 
opening chapters, use language of a peculiarly Jewish cast 
in describing the Saviour and the work He had to do: 
*He shall be great and shall be called Son of the High- 
est, and the Lord God shall give unto Him the throne of 
His father David, and He shall rule over the house of 
Jacob for ever, and of His kingdom there shall be no 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF LUKE 6i 

end' (i ^^ ^■). But like Matthew he refers the origination 
of the historic person who is the subject of this prophecy 
to the immediate act of God. 'The Holy Spirit shall 
come upon thee,' the angel says to His mother, 'and the 
power of the Most High shall overshadow thee; where- 
fore also that which is to be born shall be called holy, 
the Son of God' (i ^^). Clearly, to the writer, the Di- 
vine Sonship of Jesus was nothing official, nothing to 
which any Israehte might aspire, or. to which any man 
by the favour of heaven might be promoted; it is of His 
very being, and in the nature of the case can belong to 
Him alone. Any one who will may say that the mode 
in which the personality of Jesus originated cannot be a 
question of religious importance: but, however that may 
be, those who beUeved that His personaHty did originate 
in this unparalleled way must have given Him an un- 
paralleled place in their faith. 

In the body of his gospel the scene which throws most 
light upon Luke's way of regarding Jesus, is that which 
is given in ch. 4 ^^'^^ This scene is antedated by the 
evangelist, as is clear from the reference to a ministry of 
Jesus at Capernaum in ver. 23, but it stands where it does 
because it is characteristic for the writer, and forms to 
his mind an appropriate frontispiece to the story of Jesus. 
The heart of it lies in the words. This day is this scrip- 
ture fulfilled in your ears; but as these are words of 
Jesus, not of the evangelist, their full import need not 
be considered here. All we are called to remark is that 
Luke, though he makes no continuous appeal, like Mat- 
thew's, to the argument from prophecy, still writes from 
the beginning in the consciousness that God's gracious 
promises to His people were fulfilled in Jesus. 'The 
Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for He hath anointed 
Me to preach glad tidings to the poor.' The universal 
scope of the gospel — ^the fact that it is destined for all 



62 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

mankind, and that Jesus, therefore, is Lord of all — ^is 
hinted also in this typical introduction to His ministry. 
He is rejected in His own city, but reminds His un- 
believing townsmen how in ancient times, though there 
were many widows and many lepers in Israel, only a 
Sidonian and a Syrian had experienced the mercy of 
God. But all that is characteristic in Luke's faith is 
condensed into what he tells us of the Risen Jesus and 
His intercourse with the eleven. It is the Risen Jesus 
who is the Christ, and we see in Luke 24 "* ^- his sig- 
nificance in the evangelist's religion. It is He who is 
the subject of the Old Testament throughout; in the 
law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms — in the 
three great divisions of the Hebrew Scriptures — ^there 
are things written which have been fulfilled in Him, and 
to which His life, death, and resurrection are the only 
key. He opens the mind of His disciples to understand 
these things. The purport of all revelation, He would 
have them know — ^and this certainly is the understand- 
ing of Luke — ^is that the Christ should suffer, and should 
rise again on the third day, and that repentance for re- 
mission of sins should be preached in His name to all 
nations. That the commission implied in this may be 
properly discharged, and the disciples prove worthy 
witnesses to their Master, He promises to send forth 
upon them the promise of the Father, the Spirit which 
will invest them in power from on high. It needs a 
greater effort than we can easily make to realise that 
Jesus had the place which this implies in the hearts of 
men who knew Him upon earth. But it is not open to 
question that it is the place He had in the mind of Luke. 
He owed His being in the world to the immediate and 
mysterious act of God. In His baptism He Himself 
was clothed with power from on high. The great and 
gracious purpose of God, shadowed forth in ancient 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF LUKE 63 

Scripture, was achieved in Him. The hope of the sinful 
world lay in the repentance and remission of sins preached 
in His name. The spiritual power — ^in other words, the 
power of God — ^which accompanied the apostles' testi- 
mony and evoked new life in the souls of men, was His 
gift. The words in ch. 24^^ — ^'they worshipped Him' — ■ 
are possibly not part of the original text, but there is 
nothing in them out of harmony with this representation 
of Jesus. The person whose origin and career are such 
as the evangelist describes — ^the Person who is now ex- 
alted to God's right hand, and who sends the promised 
Spirit — ^is not a member of the Church but its Head. 
Luke has a peculiar interest in His humanity; on six 
separate occasions he tells us of His prayers, besides 
referring to His habit of withdrawing to desert places 
for devotion; but side by side with this simple human 
dependence on God there is that transcendent something 
which is fully revealed in His exaltation, in His gift of 
the Spirit, and in His mission of the apostles to all the 
world. It is not the particular way in which Luke con- 
ceived this or any part of it — ^in other words, it is not his 
Christology as an intellectual construction — ^with which 
we are concerned; it is the fact that Jesus had in the 
religious life of the evangelist the place and the impor- 
tance which are here implied. Not that there is anything 
in it which we have not seen elsewhere, but it shows us 
once more, and if possible more clearly than ever, how 
incomparable is the significance of Jesus for Christian 
faith. 

It is natural for us to examine the S3Tioptic gospels 
separately, yet we must not overlook the fact that they 
are not independent, and that it is not the personal 
pecuUarities of their authors which make them important. 
In point of fact they are anonymous writings, and though 
there are excellent reasons for connecting them with the 



64 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

persons whose names they bear, it is not on this that 
their value depends. It Hes greatly in the fact that they 
were produced in the Church, for the Church, and by 
men who were members of the Church, so that they are 
witnesses to us not of the individual peculiarities of their 
writers, but of the common faith. They were all written 
in the generation which followed the death of St. Paul, 
and what we see in them, speaking broadly, is Jesus as 
He was apprehended by the Church of those early days. 
The Jesus whom we see here is the Jesus on which the 
Christian community over all the world depended for 
its being. As far as He lived at all for the early Cath- 
olic Church he lived in the character in which He is 
here exhibited. In other words. He lived not as another 
good man, however distinguished his goodness might be, 
but as one who confronted men in the saving power, 
and therefore in the truth and reality of God. Whether 
the words in Luke 24 " are genuine or not, the fact re- 
mains that at no date can we find any trace of a Church 
which did not worship Him. 



VIII 

CHRIST IN THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS 

The New Testament writings which bear the name 
of John are certainly connected somehow, though how it 
is not easy to determine. It is not so long ago since 
the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel were regarded 
as the opposite extremes of early Christianity, represent- 
ative of modes of thought and feeling so remote and 
antagonistic as to be virtually exclusive of each other; 
but deeper study has brought them in some respects into 
closer mutual relation than any books of the New Tes- 



CHRISTIANITY OF THE APOCALYPSE 65 

tament. In both there is the same passionate uncom- 
promising temper, the same sense of the absolute 
distinction between that which is and that which is not 
Christian. In the Apocalypse it is manifested on the 
field of history and of conduct; there is war without 
truce and without quarter between the followers of the 
Lamb and those of the beast, and the supreme, we might 
almost say the sole, Christian virtue is fidelity unto death. 
In the gospel it sometimes seems to be put more ab- 
stractly; it is exhibited in the antitheses of light and 
darkness, life and death, love and hatred. These an- 
titheses, however, are absolute, and they centre round 
Christ. He who has the Son has life; he who has not 
the Son has not the life. He who believes on the Son 
is not condemned; he who believes not is condemned 
already, because he has not believed on the name of the 
onh' begotten Son of God. In spite, however, of the 
fundamental affinity of these writings in temper, it will 
be convenient to examine them apart and to see in each 
in turn the significance of Christ for the writer's faith. 

(a) The Apocalypse 

There is a sense in which the Apocalypse might be 
called the most Christian book in the New Testament. 
Written at a time of persecution and conflict, every 
feeling in it is strained and intense; there is a passion 
in all it asserts of Christ, and in all its longings for Christ, 
which can hardly be paralleled elsewhere. If what 
we had to do was to reconstruct the Christology of the 
writer we might have a difficult task. His picture of 
Jesus has features which seem to come from the most 
various sources — Jewish Messianic expectations, resting 
on the book of Daniel or apocalyptic books of the same 
kind; the earthly life and the passion of Jesus; the epis- 
5 



66 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

ties of Paul, and possibly even the Jewish speculation 
of Alexandria. Bousset refers only to one part of the 
book — the epistles to the seven churches — but his words 
hold good of the whole when he writes : ' What we have 
here is a layman's faith, undisturbed by any theological 
reflexion, a faith which, with untroubled naivete^ simply 
identifies Christ in His predicates and attributes with 
God, and on the other hand also calmly takes over quite 
archaic elements.' * It is the writer's faith in Christ we 
wish to define, and the absence of theology should make 
our task the easier. 

The book is described as the revelation of Jesus Christ 
which God gave to Him. The subordination of Jesus 
Christ to God is assumed, but Jesus Christ is for the 
Church the source and in some sense also the subject 
of all that is revealed. This is part at least of what is 
meant in 19^^: the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of 
prophecy. The inspired voices which are heard in the 
Christian community are moved by Him and bear wit- 
ness to Him. But passing from this point, we find at 
once the fullest revelation of the seer's faith in Christ in 
what may be called his covering letter, enclosing the 
epistles of cc. 2 and 3: 'John, to the seven churches 
that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace, from him 
which is and which was and which is to come; and from 
the seven Spirits which are before his throne; and from 
Jesus Christ, who is the faithful Witness, the firstborn of 
the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth. Unto 
him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by his 
blood; and he made us to be a kingdom, to be priests 
unto his God and Father; to him be the glory and the 
dominion for ever and ever. Amen. Behold, he cometh 
with the clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they 
which pierced him; and aU the tribes of the earth shall 

^ Die Offenharung Johannis, 280. 



CHRISTIANITY OF THE APOCALYPSE 67 

moiim over Him. Even so, Amen.' What first strikes 
us here, as it has so often done already, is the co-ordi- 
nation of Jesus Christ with God and His Spirit. We 
may say 'His Spirit' quite freely; for whatever may be 
the genealogy of the expression, 'the seven spirits which 
are before His throne' — and it can hardly be questioned 
that it is connected with the Persian Amshaspands — the 
seven spirits are never separated in the Apocalypse; they 
have not, as in the Persian mythology, proper names; 
they are treated as a unity in which the fulness of the 
divine power is gathered up. The eternal God, the 
Spirit in its plenitude, and Jesus Christ: this is the 
sum of the divine reality from which grace and peace 
come to the churches. No one has in his mind all that 
a Christian means when he says God unless he has in 
his mind all that is covered in these three names. For 
the writer of the Apocalypse, and for the faith by which 
he lives, Jesus Christ belongs to the sphere of the divine. 
After naming Jesus he proceeds to describe Him as 'the 
faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, the ruler of the 
kings of the earth.' Possibly all these words describe 
Jesus in His exaltation: He is the faithful witness as 
bearing from heaven that true testimony to God (or to 
Himself) by which, as we have seen, the prophets of the 
Christian Church are inspired. But in the doxology 
which follows there is more than this. The writer turns 
from the exaltation of Jesus to His passion, and it is the 
passion, in its motive and its fruits, which inspires his 
praise. 'Unto Him that loveth us, and loosed us from 
our sins in His blood ... be the glory and the dominion 
for ever and ever.' Nothing could be conceived in wor- 
ship more intense, more passionate and unreserved, 
than this: it gives to Jesus Christ, with irrepressible 
abandonment, the utmost that the soul can ever give to 
God. This is not theology, but worship, and it is here 



68 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

the interest lies. It is not orthodoxy, it is living faith, 
and it shows us the place of Christ in the religion of 
John and of those to whom he wrote. And the Church 
not only owes to Jesus the wonderful emancipation and 
exaltation here described — ^the liberation from sin and 
the kingly and priestly dignity — ^it owes to Him also 
everything for which it still hopes. 'Behold, He cometh 
with the clouds.' What His coming means it takes the 
the whole book to tell, but it so includes every Christian 
hope that all Christian prayers can be briefly compre- 
hended in the words, 'Come, Lord Jesus' (22^®). 

The vision of the Son of Man in ch. i ^^ ^- is remark- 
able as applying to Jesus several of the features which in 
Daniel 7, on which it is based, belong to the Ancient of 
Days; but what is most remarkable in it is the assump- 
tion of divine attributes by the Risen Lord Himself. 'I 
am the first and the last and the living one, and I became 
dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever, and have 
the keys of death and of Hades.' This is not the lan- 
guage of the first of the saints, but of one whose relation 
to believers is quite disparate from any relation they can 
ever bear to each other. What gives it impressiveness, 
too, is the fact that it is no mere theologoumenon, no 
piece of speculative doctrine which has been artificially 
produced and is without practical consequence; the 
divine significance of Jesus which is exhibited in it is 
applied with heart-searching power, in the seven epistles, 
to everything in the moral life of the Church. Addressed 
as they are to local communities, and dealing with local 
conditions, these epistles are almost as directly as the cen- 
tral chapters of the fourth gospel a testimony of Jesus 
to Himself. They are concerned throughout with Him, 
and with His relations to the churches, and His inter- 
est in them. It is worth while to read them thinking 
only of the Speaker, or noticing only what is said in 



CHRISTIANITY OF THE APOCALYPSE 69 

the first person. * I know thy works. Thou hast patience 
and didst endure for My name's sake. I have it against 
thee that thou hast left thy first love. I will remove 
thy candlestick out of its place unless thou repent. Thou 
hatest . . . what I also hate. To him that overcometh 
will I give to eat of the tree of life. . . . These things 
saith the First and the Last ... Be thou faithful unto 
death, and I will give thee the crown of life. . . . 
These things saith He that hath the sharp two-edged 
sword. . . . Thou holdest fast My name and didst not 
deny My faith even in the days when Antipas, My wit- 
ness, My faithful one, was slain among you. . . . To 
him that overcometh will I give of the hidden manna. 
. . . These things saith the Son of God, who hath 
His eyes as a flame of fire. ... I know thy works . . . 
but I have against thee. ... All the churches shall 
know that I am He that searcheth reins and hearts and 
shall give you each according to your works. . . . What 
ye have hold fast until I come. And he that overcom- 
eth and keepeth My works unto the end, I will give 
him authority over the nations. . . . These things 
saith He that hath the seven spirits of God. ... I 
know thy works. ... I have found no works of thine 
fulfilled before My God. . . . Thou hast a few names in 
Sardis that have not defiled their garments, and they 
shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy. He 
that overcometh shall be clothed thus in white garments, 
and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, 
and I will confess his name before My Father and before 
His angels. . . . These things saith He that is holy, He 
that is true. . . . Thou hast kept My word and hast not 
denied My name. I will make them know that I have 
loved thee. Thou hast kept the word of My patience, 
and I will keep thee from the hour of temptation. He 
that pyercometh, I will make him a pillar in the Temple 



70 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

of My God, and he shall go no more out, and I will 
write upon him the name of My God, and the name of 
the city of My God, the new Jerusalem, and My new 
name. . . . These things saith the Amen, the faithful 
and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God. 
I know thy works. Thou art wretched and miserable 
and poor and blind and naked. I counsel thee to buy of 
Me. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Behold, 
I stand at the door and knock. If any one hear My 
voice and open the door, I will come into him and will 
sup with him and he with Me. He that overcometh, I 
will give to him to sit down with Me on My throne, even 
as I overcame and sat down with My Father on His 
throne.' . . . For the practical comprehension of the 
place of Jesus, not in the creed or the theology, but in 
the faith and life of primitive Christianity, these extracts 
from the epistles to the seven churches are priceless. It 
does not matter what the speculative Christology of the 
writer was, or whether he had any such thing; it does 
not matter, in phrases like 'the beginning of the creation 
of God' (3^0» and 'the word of God' (19''), whether 
we are or are not to trace the influence of Paul or of the 
Alexandrian philosophers: here we are in contact with 
the living soul of Christianity, and however He may have 
been conceived we see what Christ vitally and prac- 
tically meant for it. In any meaning we can attach to 
the term. His significance for it was divine. It is impos- 
sible to convey any idea of it if we think of Jesus as re- 
lated to the Church and its members merely in the way 
in which they are related to each other. The whole 
conception is the more remarkable in the Apocalypse 
because the writer shows himself peculiarly sensitive 
about worship being offered to angels, superhuman 
though they are (19^^, 22^), and because the idea of 
apotheosisj or the bestowing of divine honours on a 



CHRISTIANITY OF JOHN'S EPISTLES 71 

human being, is, as his attitude to Caesar worship shows, 
one which he regards with the utmost horror. The 
adoration of the Lamb, an adoration in which not only 
those who are redeemed to God by His blood partici- 
pate, but every creature in heaven and earth and under 
the earth, is in keeping with the divine significance He 
has for Christian souls. If He sometimes stands between 
the throne and the Redeemed, as their representative 
with God, at others He is on the throne, as God's om- 
nipotent love ruling all things on their behalf. The 
throne itself is the throne of God and of the Lamb, and 
it is the glory of those who partake in the first resurrec- 
tion that they become priests of God and of Christ (20®). 
If we add to this that the sum of all Christian hope is 
the Coming of Christ, and that with His final advent all 
things are made new, it is unnecessary to say more. The 
writer's Christ ology may mingle naively archaic elements 
like the lion of the tribe of Judah, or the iron sceptre 
which dashes nations in pieces, with speculative ideas 
like the first principle of creation or the eternal divine 
word — ^it matters not. What his work reveals is that 
Jesus is practically greater than any or all these ways 
of representing Him; neither the imagination of the 
Jew nor the philosophical faculty of the Greek can em- 
body Him; in the faith and life of the seer He has an 
importance to which neither is adequate; the only true 
name for Him is one which is above every name. 

(6) The Epistles of John 

It is convenient to take the epistles of John before the 
Gospel, not because they are earUer in date, which is im- 
probable, but because they are epistles, and we can see 
without difficulty the place which Jesus holds in the 
writer's faith. The interest of these documents is all the 



72 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

greater that the author himself is deeply concerned to 
show that that place can be historically justified. 

The Christian religion has to do with what he calls 
eternal life. This life has been manifested, and has 
become an experience and a possession of men. The 
writer himself shares in it, and it is his desire and the 
purpose of his epistle that his readers should share in it 
also. 'What we have seen and heard we announce to 
you also, that you also may have fellowship with us: yea 
and our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, 
Jesus Christ' (i. i ^). This co-ordination of the Son with 
the Father, which we have traced in all the New Testa- 
ment writings from the epistles to the Thessalonians 
onward, is peculiarly characteristic of the epistles of 
John. The Son and the Father are terms of absolute 
significance; there is only one Son as there is only one 
Father, and the salvation of men depends upon a rela- 
tion to the Son and the Father in which neither can be 
conceived apart from the other. 'God has given to us 
eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the 
Son has the life, he who has not the Son of God has not 
the fife' (i. 5 " ). He who denies the Son has not the 
Father either, but he who confesses the Son has the 
Father also (i. 2^^). The perfect Christian life is that 
of those who abide in the Son and in the Father (i. 2 ^^). 
'We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given 
us an understanding that we know Him that is true, and 
we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. 
This is the true God and eternal life' (i. 5^^). This is 
the language not of theology, but of spiritual experience, 
and it shows, with a clearness which cannot be mistaken, 
the place which Jesus holds in the religious life of the 
apostle. He owes to Him as to God, or he owes to 
God in and through Him alone, all that he calls truth 
and life. It is this incomparable significance of Christ, 



CHRISTIANITY OF JOHN'S EPISTLES 73 

this experimentally ascertained fact, that He is to God 
what no other is, and therefore discharges in the carry- 
ing out of God's redeeming work functions on which no 
other can intrude, which is represented when He is des- 
ignated the only-begotten Son (i. 4 ^). It is perhaps 
an outcome of it that the apostle never calls Christians 
sons of God; the title Son is reserved for the Only-be- 
gotten, on whom all are dependent for their knowledge 
of the Father; the other members of the family are not 
oh), (sons) to John, but rixva (children). It even leads 
to such an unparalleled expression as we find in the 
salutation of the second epistle: Grace, mercy, peace 
shall be with you from God the Father, and from Jesus 
Christ the Son of the Father, in truth and love. 

The fellowship with the Father and the Son in which 
eternal life consists is maintained by walking in the 
light. When Christians walk in the light, it is made 
evident in two results: first, their unity is maintained — 
they have fellowship one with other; second, their holi- 
ness is promoted — ^the blood of Jesus, God's son, cleanses 
them from all sin (i. i ^). Sin is that which mars fellow- 
ship with God, and makes it impossible; and if eternal 
life can only be realised in divine fellowship, then the 
work of the Son of God, in putting such fellowship 
within our reach, must be in its very essence a work 
related to sin. This may be said without exaggeration 
to be the burden of the first epistle. *My little children, 
these things write I unto you that ye may not sin. And 
if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, 
Jesus Christ the Righteous; and He is the propitiation 
for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole 
world' (i. 2^^). 'I write to you, little children, be- 
cause your sins have been forgiven you for His name's 
sake' (i. 2 ^2). These two ideas — ^the eternal life into 
which men are initiated by Christ; and the propitiation 



74 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

for sins on which it is dependent — are combined in the 
wonderful passage in i. 4®^, where both are inter- 
preted as manifestations of the love of God. 'In this 
was the love of God manifested in our case, that God 
hath sent His only-begotten Son into the world that we 
might live through Him. In this is love, not that we 
loved God but that He loved us, and sent His Son a 
propitiation for our sins.'' When we put these various 
utterances together we see the universal and absolute 
significance of Jesus in the faith of the writer. Jesus 
determines everything in the relations of God and man, 
not only eventually or once for all, but continuously; 
His blood cleanses, in the present tense: if any man 
sin, we have an advocate for the emergency; Christians 
are those who are in the Son (i. 2 ^), and who abide in 
Him (i. 2*). The full apostolic testimony is that the 
Father has sent His Son as Saviour of the world (i. 4 "). 
It is only excessive familiarity which can deaden our 
minds to assertions so stupendous. There is nothing 
like them elsewhere in Scripture. No earlier messen- 
ger of God, Moses, Elijah, or Isaiah, has anything analo- 
gous said of him. The conception of a prophet does 
not help us in the very least to appreciate the concep- 
tion of the only-begotten Son, who is the Saviour of 
the world because He is the propitiation for its sins. 
He cannot be understood except as one who confronts 
men in the truth, love, and power of God — not one of 
ourselves, to whom we owe no more, at least in kind, 
than we owe to each other; but one through whom, 
and through whom alone, God enlightens, redeems 
and quickens men. The idea of His exaltation is not 
so constantly expressed as in the epistles of Paul, but 
His Parousia or manifestation in glory is expected, and 
the consummation of all Christian hopes is connected 
with it. The believer is so to live that he may not be 



CHRISTIANITY OF JOHN'S EPISTLES 75 

ashamed before Him at His coming (i. 2 2^), nay, that 
he may have boldness in the day of judgment (i. 4*^): 
we know that if He shall be manifested we shall be like 
Him; and having this hope set upon Him we must purify 
ourselves as He was pure (i. 3 ^ ^O. 

And yet, side by side with this presentation of Jesus, 
which may be said to be at once transcendent and ex- 
perimental, we find a persistent emphasis laid on the 
reality of His human life. The epistle is a testimony to 
one who had lived as man among men, and everything 
that imperils this historical basis of Christianity imperils 
the Christian life itself. This at least is how the matter 
is conceived by the author. He is the only New Testa- 
ment writer who uses the term antichrist; and the anti- 
christ is identified by him with the denial of Jesus Christ 
as having come in the flesh (i. 2 ^*'^^, 4^, 11. verse 7). 
The reference in these passages is to the mode of thought 
which is usually associated with the name of Cerinthus. 
Cerinthus distinguished Jesus from the Christ.* The 
Christ was a divine being who descended from heaven 
and was associated with Jesus from His baptism on- 
ward; this is what is meant by coming 'through the 
water.' But according to Cerinthus, he came through 
the water only; he was not indissolubly associated with 
Jesus so as to pass also through His agony and death. 
He did not come in the water and in the blood. This 
is the mode of thought which, to the writer, is * antichrist,' 
a denial of the essential facts on which Christianity de- 
pends for its being. For him the only Christ is Jesus; the 
only fatal lie is that which declares that Jesus is not the 
Christ (i. 2^2). He has what might almost be called a 
dogmatic test for 'spirits' speaking in the Church: every 
spirit which confesses Jesus Christ as come in the flesh 
is of God, md every spirit that does not confess Jesus 

^Irenaeus, Adv. Haer, i. 21. 



76 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

is not of God (i. 4^). The one victor over the world 
is he who beheves that Jesus is the Son of God, the 
Jesus who came in the water and in the blood, and whose 
whole life from the baptism to the passion, unquestioned 
in its historical reality, is perpetuated in the Church, in 
its spiritual meaning and virtue, in the Christian sacra- 
ments — ^Baptism answering to 'the water* and the Supper 
to the 'blood.' ^ What has been already said about 
the Son as standing in some sort of co-ordination with 
the Father — ^about His confronting men as the Saviour 
of the world, the propitiation for all sin, the sole bearer 
of eternal life — ^is not to be put into any kind of com- 
petition or contrast with this; in the mind of the writer, 
the Person of whom these extraordinary things are 
true is the historical person who was baptized by John 
in Jordan and who hung at Calvary on the Cross. It is 
the historical truth and reality of the life of Jesus on which 
the eternal Hfe of believers is dependent; to assail or under- 
mine the one is to threaten the other at its foundation. 

The Cerinthian interpretation of Christianity was no 
doubt derived from the dualistic philosophy of the time; 
people shrank or affected to shrink from the idea that a 
spiritual or divine nature could be intimately or per- 
manently related to matter, and especially from the idea 
that it could pass through the degrading and odious squalor 
of the crucifixion. Although the same motives do not 
operate now, what is practically the same result is often 
reached under another impulse. Men are attracted by the 
idea that the Christian rehgion should be lifted above the 
region in which historic doubts are possible; they wish 
to refine it, to spiritualise it, to make it an affair of ideas 
to which any given historical fact is immaterial. It is as 
if they said, All these things are true — ^but they are true 
in independence of Jesus. There are such realities as 

^See Expositor, May, jc)o8. Article by the writer. 



CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 77 

eternal life, divine sonship, forgiveness of sins — ^yes, and 
even propitiation for sins — ^but they are realities which 
belong to the eternal world; they have their being in 
God, and Jesus is only accidentally related to them. 
Once grasp the principle of Christianity, and Jesus, like 
every other historical person, is indifferent to it. He 
has no place in the gospel, though He (and no other) 
may have been the occasion of these eternal truths break- 
ing upon one or another mind. All that has to be said 
about this at present is that it is not the understand- 
ing of the writer of these epistles. It is a mode of thought 
which in all essentials was present to his mind, and 
which he deliberately and decisively rejected. It was 
not simply incongruous or uncongenial, it was fatal 
to Christianity as he understood it. For it is impossible 
to read otherwise than literally the words with which he 
introduces himself to his readers: 'That which was 
from the beginning, which we have heard, which we 
have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and 
our hands handled, concerning the word of life — and 
the life was manifested, and we have seen and bear 
witness and announce to you the eternal life which was 
with the Father and was manifested unto us — ^that which 
we have seen and heard we announce to you also, that 
you also may have fellowship with us; yea, and our 
fellowship is with the Father and with His . Son Jesus 
Christ' (i. I ^■^). It is this unity of the historical and the 
eternal, this eternal and divine significance of the his- 
torical, which is the very stamp and seal of the Christian 
religion. 

(c) The Gospel according to John 

In examining the synoptic gospels we had occasion 
to remark on the distinction which has to be drawn in 
them between the testimony of the evangelists to Jesus 



78 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

and the testimony of Jesus to Himself. Though the 
writers of these gospels would not have drawn such a 
distinction themselves, and did their work, so far as we 
can see, quite unconscious of it, it is necessary that we 
should draw it, and it is not in their case too difficult to 
apply it. The difficulty is very much increased and 
amounts at various points to an impossibility when we 
come to the fourth gospel. There is only one style in 
the gospel from beginning to end, and every one speaks 
in it — John the Baptist, Jesus, the evangelist himself. 
There is only one mode of thought represented in it from 
beginning to end, and every one shares it — ^John the 
Baptist, Jesus, the evangelist himself. What it enables 
us to see with indubitable clearness is the place which 
Jesus holds in the faith and life of the writer; what we 
cannot so easily recover from it is the exact relation of 
this place to that which Jesus Himself claimed. It is 
true that to a large extent the writer's testimony to Jesus 
is given through Jesus' life; it is represented as the very 
word of the Lord Himself. But the critical study of the 
gospel, and especially the comparison of it with the 
synoptics, makes it doubtful how far we can take this 
literally. It is the preponderating opinion of all who have 
investigated the subject that the fourth gospel is in sub- 
stance the fulfilment of the words of Jesus which we read 
in c. i6 *^: 'I have many things to say imto you, but ye 
cannot bear them now. But when He is come, the Spirit 
of truth. He shall lead you into all the truth . . . He shall 
glorify Me, for He shall take of Mine and shall declare it 
imto you.' The Jesus who speaks in its pages, though 
it is in form a gospel, and follows the course of His life 
on earth, is not only the Jesus who taught in the syna- 
gogues and fields of Galilee, or in the temple courts and 
streets of Jerusalem, but also the exalted Lord whose 
spirit vivifies and interprets the memories of Jesus in 



CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 79 

the heart of an intimate, devoted, and experienced dis- 
ciple. The words of Jesus are connected, of course, 
with times and places, for they are given as part of a 
historical career, but they do not belong to time or place; 
they are the expression of the eternal truth which was 
revealed in Jesus, and which for the writer is identical 
with Him. They are the word, rather than the words, 
of the Lord. They are the authentic revelation of what 
He is and was, as His Spirit has interpreted Him to the 
evangelist, rather than the ipsissima verba of Jesus of 
Nazareth. But while this makes it more difficult to use 
the fourth gospel without reflection in answering the 
second of the two questions with which we are concerned, 
it gives us ampler material to answer the first. The way 
in which Jesus presents Himself in the gospel can gene- 
rally be taken as embodying the evangelist's own sense 
of his place and significance for faith. 

Although the procedure is open to criticism, we jegin 
with the prologue. The immense influence which these 
few verses have had in determining the doctrine of the 
Catholic Church, and the tendency of a once dominant 
critical school to interpret them in a purely philosophical 
and speculative interest, should not blind us to their essen- 
tially practical, historical, and, it may even be added, ex- 
perimental character. The main propositions they con- 
tain are those of vv. 14 and 16: 'The word was made flesh 
and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of 
the only begotten from the Father, jull of grace and 
truth. . . . Of His fultiess we all received, and grace 
upon grace.' This is entirely in keeping with what we 
have found in the first epistle; and in spite of the attempts 
that have been made to find divergent modes of thought 
in the two documents and to assign them to different 
hands, the view of Lightfoot still seems to me to have 
everything in its favour — ^viz,, that the epistle is a sort 



So JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

of covering letter accompanying and recommending 
the gospel.* The gospel exhibits Jesus in His life in 
the flesh in precisely that significance for faith which He 
has in the epistle. There is the same insistence on the 
flesh, on the historical reality, to which immediate testi- 
mony is borne; there is the same emphasis on the con- 
ception of Christ as 'Only-begotten,' one who gives 
others the right to become children of God (i ^^), but has 
an incomparable sonship of His own; there is the same 
sense of owing everything to Him (i *^). There is not 
in the prologue a single word which betrays a purely 
speculative interest, such as we find, for example, in 
Philo. There is not a single technical term. The writer 
has no philosophical problems or conundrums for the 
solving of which he makes use of the category of the 
Logos. The one immeasurable reality which fills and 
holds his mind is Jesus. Jesus has been to him the 
Interpreter of God (i *^) : in knowing Him he has known 
God as he never did before; in seeing Him he has seen 
the Father: in associating with Him he has been flooded 
as it were, wave upon wave, with the fulness of grace 
and truth which dwelt in Him. This is fundamental 
in the prologue as it stands, and is the key to every- 
thing else it contains. Possibly we understand it best 
by comparing it with the other gospels. To all the evan- 
gelists Jesus is a great person, and it lies on them some- 
how to exhibit and explain His greatness. Mark, who 
is the earliest, does least. He connects Jesus with John 
the Baptist, and by a single allusion to the prophecies 
of Isaiah and Malachi, which were fulfilled in the fore- 
runner, leaves us to infer that in Jesus God's ancient 
purposes are being achieved. Matthew goes further. He 
introduces Jesus as the Christ, son of David, son of 
Abraham. He is the key to the whole Jewish history: 

^Biblical Essays, 63, 198. 



CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 8i 

the one true religion, beginning with the father of the 
faithful, has its consummation in Him. Luke goes 
further still. He traces the genealogy of Jesus not to 
Abraham but to Adam. He is sensible that His signifi- 
cance is not national but universal, and that to appreciate 
His greatness we must understand His essential relation 
not only to Israel but to the whole human race. But for 
John none of these ways of representing the greatness 
and significance of Jesus is adequate. To exhibit the 
truth about Him, or rather to exhibit Him in the truth of 
His being, we must relate Him not to the Baptist merely, 
or to Abraham, or to the father of mankind, but to the 
eternal being of God. This is what the writer does by 
means of the Logos idea, and it is for this purpose alone 
that he makes use of the idea. He does not arbitrarily 
assign to Jesus all or any of the functions assigned to 
the Logos in Heraclitus and the Stoics, or in the Alex- 
andrian philosophy of Philo; in such things he has less 
than no interest. His heart is where his treasure is, 
with Jesus. In coming into contact with Jesus he has 
come into contact with the eternal truth and love of God; 
the final and all-sufiicient revelation of Him whom no 
man has seen has been made in the Only-begotten. 
There is nothing in the universe — ^nothing in nature, in 
history, in all that has ever been known as religion or 
revelation — that can truly be understood except in this 
light (vv. 1-12). The world, as it has been put before, 
is a Christian world, and we do not understand it finally 
till everything in it has been set into relation to Christ. 
To set everything into relation to Christ, under this pro- 
found sense of His universal significance, is the purpose 
of the writer in the opening verses of his gospel. He 
does so in bold outlines, in a few brief sentences; and he 
borrows the conception of the Logos for a moment, be- 
cause in the environment for which he wrote it facilitated 
6 



§2 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

the execution of his purpose. But though he borrows the 
conception, he does not borrow from it. He does not 
invest Jesus with an unreal greatness which belongs to 
this philosophical conception and not to the Person. 
Jesus is too great for this, and too real; the writer knows 
Him too well, and his d:.votion to Him is too absolute; 
as the gospel itself will show, he can say everything he 
has to say about Jesus without so much as using the 
term; and the interest of the prologue for our present 
purpose is that it puts at the very outset, though in a form 
that has created some misapprehension, his sense of the 
divine, eternal, and universal significance of Jesus. At 
the risk of being tiresome, it may be said once more that 
he did not borrow this from the Logos; he borrowed the 
Logos, because it lent itself to the convenient and intelli- 
gible expression of this independent Christian conviction. 
The value of the Logos doctrine for a Christian is that 
it can be used in this way, and if it ceased to be as con- 
venient or as intelligible to modern readers as it was to 
Christians of Asia Minor when the gospel was published, 
its value would be gone. 

When we pass from the prologue to the body of the gos- 
pel, we are practically in the same world of thought 
and experience which we know already from the first 
epistle. The writer himself tells us formally the purpose 
of his work. 'These things are written that ye may 
beUeve that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that 
believing ye may have Hfe in His name' (ch. 20 ^^). The 
ultimate aim of the evangelist here is the same with that 
which we find on the lips of Jesus Himself in c. 10 ^°: *I 
am come that they might have life* ; and in more solemn 
and formal terms in ch. 17 ^^'i 'Thou hast given Him 
power over all flesh, that all which Thou hast given Him 
He may give unto them eternal life. And this is life eter- 
nal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and 



CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 83 

Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.' In view 
of these passages and others like them which occur on 
every page, it is hardly worth while investigating the 
titles by which the evangelist or those who figure in his 
pages represent to themselves the significance of Jesus — 
the Christ, the Son of God, the King of Israel, the Son 
of Man. The Person to whom men owe eternal life is a 
Person to whom no previously defined name is adequate; 
whatever term we apply to Him is transfigured by the 
very application; in contact with Him it fills with a 
meaning which it never had before. A remarkable 
proof of this is the way in which Jesus uses of Himself in 
the gospel the expression iyd) elfxt^ 'I am,' without any 
definite predicate. 'If ye do not believe that I am, ye 
shall die in your sins' (8^*). 'When ye have lifted up 
the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I am' (8 "'). 
* Henceforth I tell you before it come to pass, that ye may 
believe when it has come to pass, that I am' (13 ^^). 'The 
only appropriate supplement in such passages is 'the 
all decisive personality,' ^ by relation to whom every- 
thing in human destiny is determined. Jesus is what He 
is; no one can reduce this to a finite formula, but every- 
thing that we mean by eternal Ufe is dependent upon it. 
Sometimes the emphasis in exhibiting what He is falls 
upon His relation to God. To know the only true God, 
and Him whom He sent, Jesus Christ, is one (17 ^). He 
who has seen Jesus has seen the Father, and there is no 
other way to see Him. He is in the Father and the 
Father in Him (14 ^^•); I and the Father, He says, are 
one. 'One' is neuter, not masculine: Jesus and the 
Father constitute one power, by which the salvation of 
man is secured; He gives his sheep eternal life, and no 
power can pluck them out of His hand, because no 
power can pluck anything from the Father's hand, with 

^Holtzmann, Handcommentar, iv. 131. 



84 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

whom, to this intent, Jesus is identified (lo^^). Jesus is 
the only-begotten Son, in the bosom of the Father (i **, 
3 ^^) ; He quickens whom He will, and has all judg- 
ment committed to Him, that all men may honour the 
Son even as they honour the Father (5 ^^ ^•). A person 
so related to God is manifestly incommensurable with 
others; he is not conceived as the author of the gospel 
conceived him, he has not the place in our faith which 
he had in his, if he can be classified with even the great- 
est and most spiritual men. In some peculiar way 
he belongs to that side or aspect of reality which we call 
divine; he does not stand with us in the Christian reli- 
gion, sharing our worship and our needs, offering on his 
own behalf the prayers we offer on ours; he confronts 
us in the life, power, and grace of God. 

This absolute significance of Jesus for religion is vividly 
emphasised not only in His relation to God, but also in 
all His intercourse with men in the gospel. His relation 
to them is as incomparable as His relation to His Father. 
He is always a problem, but He is always suggesting to 
those around Him solutions of the problem which all the 
world can understand, and in which all the world is 
interested. Who is this ? the Jews ask. Is it the Christ ? 
How shall we tell whether He is the Christ or not ? When 
the Christ comes. He is to come mysteriously: no one 
is to know whence He is; but do we not know all about 
this man's origin? The Christ is to come from Beth- 
lehem; but is not this man a Galilean? The Christ 
is to renew the miracles of the Exodus and the wil- 
derness; this man has done signs unquestionably, but are 
they signal enough to attest Him as the Messiah? As 
against this feeble professional criticism, which what- 
ever else may be said of it must always be the affair of 
a few, Jesus offers Himself to the universal needs of 
men. 'I am the bread of life.' 'If any man thirst, let 



CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 85 

him come unto me and drink.' 'I am the Ught of the 
world/ *I am the door.' 'I am the good shepherd.' 
*I am resurrection and Hfe.' 'I am the way, the truth, 
and the life.' These are not words which it requires 
theological science to understand; they can only be 
interpreted by human need, but that secures that they 
can be understood by all. Whoever knows what it is to 
be hungry or thirsty, to be in the dark, to be outside, to 
be forlorn, wandered, dead, may know Jesus. This is 
the one thing of which the evangelist is sure, that there 
is no human need, not even the profoundest, which He 
cannot meet: of His fulness all may receive, and grace 
upon grace. In this adequacy to all the spiritual needs 
of the human race Jesus stands as completely alone as 
He does in His unique relation to the Father. The 
Saviour of the World (3 ^^ 4 *^ 12 *') can no more be 
conceived to have a rival or a partner than the only- 
begotten Son of God. 

In examining the first epistle we saw that in the faith 
of the writer the eternal life which came through Christ 
was dependent upon His being a propitiation for sins. 
When he thinks of Jesus as Saviour, it is inevitably in 
this character that he conceives Him. The view taken in 
the gospel, it is sometimes alleged, is quite different. 
Here, it is said, there is no allusion to propitiation; the 
category which rules the author's thoughts is that of 
revelation, not that of atonement. Christ brings eternal 
life by making known the Father, and that is all. But 
such an interpretation of the gospel is misleading and 
superficial. There is of course a difference between a 
gospel and an epistle in every case; the emphasis in 
them will necessarily fall upon different points. But the 
fourth gospel, as we have already seen, has more of the 
character of an epistle than the other three; it is not such 
an immediate reflection of historical fact; the historical 



S6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

fact is interpreted and illumined in it by the faith and 
experience of the writer, and as he himself tells us, by the 
teaching of the Spirit; and unless we could say beforehand 
that he was a different man from the author of the epistle 
— Si proposition which has all evidence and probability 
against it — the presumption must be that on a question 
so vital the two books will be at one. This is in point 
of fact the conclusion to which we are led by an im- 
partial examination of the gospel itself. It is a book 
of testimony to Jesus, and what is the first testimony 
it presents? It is that of the Baptist in i ^® — 'Behold 
the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the 
world.' If any one believes that the Baptist here is 
only the vehicle for the faith of the evangelist, the argu- 
ment is unaffected: a lamb by which sin is taken away 
is nothing but a sacrificial lamb, and the expression 
covers precisely the same spiritual debt to Christ and 
dependence upon Him as is covered by lXafffi6<$^ or pro- 
pitiation, in the epistle (2^, 4^^). Again, at the close 
of the gospel, in the Johannine parallel to the apostolic 
commission in Matthew and Luke, we read: 'He breathed 
on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit; whose so- 
ever sins ye forgive, they are forgiven unto them; whose 
soever sins ye retain, they are retained' (20 2^). Clearly 
for the evangelist the forgiveness of sins lies at the heart 
of the gospel with which the disciples were entrusted as 
representatives of Jesus, and like everything else in the 
gospel it must be due to Him. 

But not only is this the case, it may be further shown 
that the particular way in which forgiveness is conceived 
as due to Jesus is the same in the gospel as in the epis- 
tle. Sometimes this comes out quite incidentally, and 
apart from any intention of the author. It is enough 
to recall, in illustration, his comment on the counsel 
of Caiaphas: 'You do not consider that it is for your 



CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 87 

interest that one man should die for the nation, and 
not the whole nation perish' (11 ^°). This, the evan- 
gelist adds, he said not of himself, but being high priest 
that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the 
nation, and not for the nation only but also that He 
might gather together in one the dispersed children 
of God. Such a reflection on the brutal or cynical policy 
of the high priest could never have occurred to any 
one unless it had been divinely true for him that the 
death of Jesus was the life of the world. Nay, unless 
this had been an element of the truth in which as a re- 
ligious man he lived and moved and had his being, so 
that it was always present to him without deliberate 
reflection, it is impossible to see how his comment on 
Caiaphas should have originated. But this is only 
another way of saying that the death of Jesus has in the 
gospel the same place in the writer's faith as it has in 
the epistle. 

As illustrations of the significance which he assigns 
it in a more conscious fashion we may refer to the great 
sacramental discourses in the third and sixth chapters, 
and to the emphatic words about the water and the 
blood in 19 '*. It cannot be doubted that the last are to 
be interpreted in the same sense as the corresponding 
words, which have a similar and at the first glance a 
puzzling emphasis, in the epistle (5**: see above, p. 76). 
There is a reference in both places to the Christian sacra- 
ments of Baptism and the Supper which are in the writer's 
thoughts all through chapter 3 and chapter 6. If we 
look at chapter 3 connectedly, we see that the death of 
Christ comes into it precisely as it does into the epistle — 
indeed, precisely as it does into the epistle to the Romans. 
Nicodemus is being taught that we must be born again. 
The necessity of the new birth is the earthly thing which 
every one might be presumed to understand out of his 



SS JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

own experience: who has not sighed to be another crea- 
ture than he is? The heavenly thing which it is so 
hard to understand that the speaker may well despair of 
finding faith for it, is the possibility and the method of 
the new birth. No one can explain this heavenly thing 
but Jesus, and he does it in two sentences. One is that 
in which he describes it as a being born of water and of 
the spirit, where there is a reference, which it is not 
possible for the present writer to question, to Chris- 
tian baptism and to the reception of the spirit which 
was its normal accompaniment in the apostolic age. 
The other is that in which he says, *As Moses lifted 
up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son 
of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth may in 
Him have eternal life.* Apart from the suggestion of 
the figure, we know what the evangelist meant by the 
lifting up of the Son of Man: Jesus used this word, he 
tells us plainly elsewhere (12 ^^), to signify by what death 
He should die. Unless we are prepared to accuse the 
author of a rambling incoherence, and of tumbling 
out sentences which have no connexion with each other 
and could never find an intelligible context in the mind 
of his readers, we shall remember that the baptism al- 
luded to in ver. 5 is baptism in the name of Jesus, and 
specifically, as ver. 14 reminds us, in the name of Jesus 
who died for us upon the Cross. It is baptism, as Paul 
expresses it, looking to His death (Rom. 6 ^). The 
new birth is mysterious, but not magical. As the evan- 
gelist imderstood it, in its specifically Christian char- 
acter, it is normally coincident with baptism; it is an 
experience which comes to men when in penitent faith 
they cast themselves upon the Son of God uplifted on 
the Cross — ^in other words, when they commit them- 
selves to the love which in the Lamb of God taketh 
away the sin of the world by becoming a propitiation 



CHRISTIANITY OF FOURTH GOSPEL 89 

for it. Apart from such a combination of ideas, the 
discourse with Nicodemus is chaotic and unintelligible, 
and the mere fact that it is thus made lucid and co- 
herent is sufficient to vindicate this construction. It 
secures for regeneration a genuinely Christian character 
by making it depend upon the death of Jesus, and it 
only gives to that death in this passage the significance 
claimed for it from i ""^ to 19^*. 

Mutatis mutandis, all that has been said of the third 
chapter in John may be said of the sixth. The Supper 
is in the author's mind in the one as Baptism is in the 
other. The subject is Jesus as the bread of life, and the 
burden of the discourse is put with the utmost generality 
in ver. 56: 'As the living Father sent me and I live be- 
cause of the Father, so he that eateth me, he shall 
live because of me.' But the evangelist passes, volun- 
tarily or involuntarily, into the liturgical terminology 
of the sacrament when he speaks of eating the flesh 
and drinking the blood of the Son of Man; and once this 
is recognised, there can be no question as to the refer- 
ence of such words. Their reference was fixed in the 
Christian community before this gospel was written, and 
they connect the life of the Christian with the death of 
Christ. It is not a passing idea that there is such a 
connexion; it is a truth embodied in a rite perpetually 
celebrated — a truth, therefore, never absent from the 
Christian mind, regarded as of primary and vital impor- 
tance, recurring to the thoughts spontaneously on the 
strangest occasions (11 *^ ^), asserted with the most solemn 
emphasis (19^*, 6^^). It is not serious criticism which 
finds in the fourth gospel a Christ whose significance for 
faith, as a propitiation for sin, is other than that which 
meets us in the first epistle of John. The Lamb of God 
that taketh away the sin of the world — ^the Son of Man 
upUfted on the Cross as Moses lifted up the Serpent in 



go JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

the Wilderness — the Only-begotten sent of God as a 
propitiation for our sins: these are one figure, domina- 
ting thought and inspiring faith to precisely the same 
intent in the epistle and in the gospel. And in this 
character, as in every other, Jesus stands alone. It is 
in Him and in His death, in no other person and no 
other act, that for the New Testament Christian sin is 
annulled. Here above all, we may say, for New Testa- 
ment faith, there is none other name. 

Summary and Transition 

Our investigation of the place which Jesus occupied in 
the faith of those who wrote the New Testament, and of 
those whom they addressed, is now complete. To the 
present writer it is conclusive evidence that in spite of 
the various modes of thought and feeling which the 
canonical Christian writings exhibit, there is really such 
a thing as a self-consistent New Testament, and a self- 
consistent Christian religion. There is a imity in all 
these early Christian books which is powerful enough 
to absorb and subdue their differences, and that imity 
is to be found in a common religious relation to Christ, 
a common debt to Him, a common sense that everything 
in the relations of God and man must be and is deter- 
mined by Him. We may even go further and say that 
in all the great types of Christianity represented in the 
New Testament the relations of God and man are re- 
garded as profoundly affected by sin, and that the sense 
of a common debt to Christ is the sense of what Chris- 
tians owe to Him in dealing with the situation which sin 
has created. This may not involve either a formally 
identical Christology, or a formally identical doctrine of 
Propitiation, in every part of the New Testament; but 
it is the justification of every effort of Christian intelli- 



SUMMARY AND TRANSITION 91 

gence to define to itself more clearly who Jesus is and 
what He has done for our salvation from sin. The 
New Testament writers did not think of Christology 
and of the Atonement without sufficient motives, and 
as long as their sense of debt to Christ survives, the 
motive for thinking on the same subjects, and surely in 
the main on the same lines, will survive also. But this 
is not our interest here. What we have now to ask 
is whether the religion of the New Testament, consist- 
ing as it does in such a peculiar relation to Him as we 
have seen illustrated in all the documents, can be justi- 
fied by appeal to Christ Himself. With all its pecuUari- 
ties, New Testament Christianity claims to rest on a 
historical basis, and it is a question of supreme impor- 
tance whether the historical basis which can be provided 
is adequate to support it. The question is at the present 
time not only important, but urgent, for the existing 
Christian Churches, in which the relation of faith to Jesus 
perpetuates on the whole the New Testament type, are 
perplexed by voices which call them away from it in 
different directions. On the one hand, we have our 
philosophical persons who, on the specious pretext of 
lifting religion into its proper atmosphere of tmiversal 
and eternal truth, invite us, as has been already noticed, 
to dismiss historical considerations entirely. The truths 
by which Christianity lives are true, it is argued, what- 
ever we may or may not be able to find out about Jesus; 
they are true, not in Him, but in themselves and in God. 
It is a mere failure in intelligence — a sort of cowardice, to 
speak plainly — ^which makes people nervous about Jesus 
and the gospels. The Christian religion belongs to 
a world to which the historical and contingent, even 
though they should be represented by the life of Jesus, 
are matters of indifference. It will survive in all that 
is essential to it though Jesus should entirely disappear. 



92 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

On the other hand, we have our historical persons, whose 
views are very different. To get back to Jesus, they 
tell us, is not the unimportant thing which philosophy 
would make it. It is vital to get back. But when 
we do get back, what do we find? Not, according 
to many of them, anything which justifies the New Tes- 
tament attitude to Jesus, or which supports what we 
have just seen to be the New Testament religion. What 
we find in the historical Jesus is not the author or the 
object of the Christian faith known to history, but a 
child of God like ourselves — a pious, humble, good man, 
who called others to trust the Father as He trusted, and 
to be children of God like Him. The Christian religion 
is not thus left to us, with the added advantage that it 
is historically secured; when the historical basis is laid 
bare, it is seen that the Christian religion cannot be 
sustained upon it. The Christian religion has been a 
mistake, a delusion, from the beginning; our duty is 
to revert from it to the religion of Jesus Himself, to cast 
away the primitive Christian faith and its testimony, and 
to fall back upon the pattern believer. It is obvious 
that there is something dogmatic in both these appeals 
to the Church; there is a theory of religion, of history, 
and of reality in general, implied alike in the philo- 
sophical appeal which would give us a Christianity 
without Jesus, and in the historical one which would 
give us a Jesus who could take no responsibility for 
anything that has ever been called Christian. The 
writer has no such confidence in either theory as would 
justify him in assenting off-hand to the stupendous im- 
peachment of Providence which is implied in both. It is 
easy enough to admit that there may have been errors of 
every kind in the historical development of Christianity. 
The adherents of the new religion may have made in- 
tellectual blunders and moral ones, and no doubt made 



SUMMARY AND TRANSITION 93 

both. Once, too, the possibility of going astray is ad- 
mitted, it is impossible to limit it; if there can be such 
a thing as wandering, there may be wandering very far. 
But what it is not easy to admit is that Christianity 
itself, in the only form in which it has ever existed and 
functioned as a religion among men, has been a mistake 
and misconception from the first. This is the ultimate 
meaning of these 'historical' and 'philosophical' ap- 
peals to the Church, and it certainly needs courage to 
assent to them when their meaning is perceived. Less 
courageous men, or perhaps we may be allowed to say 
men with a larger perception of what is involved, will 
feel bound to proceed with less precipitation. It is not 
self-evident that eternal truth, or rather our grasp and 
apprehension of it, can be in no way historically con- 
ditioned. It is not self-evident that no historical person 
could really sustain the phenomenon of the Christian 
religion. Dismissing the summary and a priori de- 
cisions in which courageous spirits lay down the law 
beforehand to a world of which we know so little, it is 
our duty to raise the second of the two questions with 
which this discussion opened, and to examine it as dis- 
interestedly and as thoroughly as the first. It is the 
question, Does Jesus, as He is revealed to us in history, 
justify the Christian religion as we have had it exhibited 
to us in the New Testament ? 



BOOK II 

THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF THE CHRISTIAN 

FAITH 



BOOK II 

THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF THE CHRISTIAN 
FAITH 

The question which has just been stated might be ap- 
proached in various ways. We might begin with an 
investigation of the sources to which we owe our know- 
ledge of Jesus, build up by degrees such an acquaint- 
ance with Him as could be formed in this way, and then 
consider what relation it bore to the place He holds in 
New Testament faith. A moment's reflection on what 
has preceded will show the insufficiency and the im- 
propriety of this method. The primary testimony of 
the disciples to Jesus was their testimony to His resurrec- 
tion: except as Risen and Exalted they never preached 
Jesus at all. It was His Resurrection and Exaltation 
which made Him Lord and Christ, and gave Him His 
place in their faith and life; and unless their testimony 
to this fundamental fact can be accepted, it is not worth 
while to carry the investigation further. Nothing that 
Jesus was or did, apart from the Resurrection, can jus- 
tify or sustain the religious life which we see in the New 
Testament. Those who reject the apostolic testimony 
at this point may, indeed, have the highest apprecia- 
tion for the memory of Jesus; they may reverence the 
figure preserved for us by the evangelists as the ideal of 
humanity, the supreme attainment of the race in the field 
of character; but they can have no relation to Jesus re- 
sembling that in which New Testament Christians 
lived and moved and had their being. The general 
7 97 



98 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

question, therefore, whether Jesus, as He is known 
to us from history, can sustain the Christian religion 
as it is exhibited to us in the New Testament, takes 
at the outset this special form: Can we accept the tes- 
timony which we have to the resurrection and exalta- 
tion of Jesus? 



THE RESURRECTION 

It is possible, as every one knows, to decline to raise 
this question. There is a dogmatic conception of history 
which tells us beforehand that there cannot be in history 
any such event as the resurrection of Jesus is represented 
in the New Testament to be: no possible or conceivable 
evidence could prove it. With such a dogma, which is 
part of a conception of reality in general, it is impossible 
to argue; for he who holds it cannot but regard it as a 
supreme standard by which he is bound to test every 
argument alleged against it. It is not for him an isolated 
and therefore a modifiable opinion; it is part of the 
structure of intelligence to which all real opinions will 
conform. But, though it is vain to controvert such a 
dogma by argument, it may be demolished by collision 
with facts; and it is surely the less prejudiced method to 
ask what it is that the New Testament witnesses assert, 
and what is the value of their testimony. Men's minds 
have varied about the structure of intelligence and about 
its constitutive or regulative laws, and it is one of the 
elementary principles of learning to recognise that reality 
is larger than any individual intelligence, and that the 
growth of intelligence depends on its recognition of this 
truth. It is quite conceivable that the fundamental fact 
on which the life of New Testament Christianity rests, is 



THE RESURRECTION 99 

abruptly rejected by many, under the constraint of some 
such dogma, while yet they have no clear idea either of 
the fact itself, as the New Testament represents it, or 
of the evidence on which it was originally believed and 
has been believed by multitudes ever since. And if it is 
important, looking to those who deny that such an event 
as the resurrection of Jesus can have taken place, or is 
capable of proof, to present the facts bearing on the sub- 
ject as simply, clearly, and fully as possible, it is no less 
important to do so in view of those who are so preoccu- 
pied with the spiritual significance of the resurrection 
that they are willing (it might seem) to ignore the fact 
as of comparatively little or, indeed, of no account. When 
Harnack, for example, distinguishes the Easter Faith 
from the Easter Message, he practically takes this latter 
position. The Easter Faith is 'the conviction of the vic- 
tory of the crucified over death, of the power and the 
righteousness of God, and of the life of Him who is the 
first-born among many brethren.' This is the main 
thing, and just because it is a faith it is not really depen- 
dent on the Easter Message, which deals with the empty 
grave, the appearances to the disciples, and so forth. 
We can keep the faith without troubling about the mes- 
sage. 'Whatever may have happened at the grave 
and in the appearances, one thing is certain: from this 
grave the indestructible faith in the conquest of death 
and in an eternal life has taken its origin.' * Sympathis- 
ing as we must with Harnack's genuinely evangelistic 
desire to leave nothing standing between the mind of 
the age and the hope of the gospel which can possibly 
be put away, we may nevertheless doubt whether the 
Easter Faith and the Easter Message are so indifferent 
to each other. They were not unrelated at the begin- 
ning, and if we reflect on the fact that they are generally 

» Das Wesen des Christentums, loi f. 



loo JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

rejected together, it may well seem precipitate to assume 
that they are independent of each other now. To say 
that the faith produced the message — that Jesus rose 
again in the souls of His disciples, in their resurgent 
faith and love, and that this, and this alone, gave birth 
to all the stories of the empty grave and the appearances 
of the Lord to His own — is to pronounce a purely dog- 
matic judgment. What underlies it is not the historical 
evidence as the documents enable us to reach it, but an 
estimate of the situation dictated by a philosophical 
theory which has discounted the evidence beforehand. 
It is not intended here to meet dogma with dogma, but to 
ask what the New Testament evidence is, what it means, 
and what it is worth. 

Much of the difficulty and embarrassment of the sub- 
ject is due to the fact that the study of the evidences for 
the resurrection has so often begun at the wrong end. 
People have started with the narratives in the evangelists 
and become immersed in the details of these, with all the 
intricate and perhaps insoluble questions they raise, both 
literary and historical. Difficulties at this point have 
insensibly but inevitably become difficulties in their 
minds attaching to the resurrection, and affecting their 
whole attitude to New Testament religion. It ought to 
be apparent that, so far as the fact of the resurrection 
of Jesus is concerned, the narratives of the evangelists 
are quite the least important part of the evidence with 
which we have to deal. It is no exaggeration to say 
that if we do not accept the resurrection on grounds 
which lie outside this area, we shall not accept it on the 
grounds presented here. The real historical evidence 
for the resurrection is the fact that it was believed, 
preached, propagated, and produced its fruit and effect 
in the new phenomenon of the Christian Church, long 
before any of our gospels was written. This is not said 



THE RESURRECTION loi 

to disparage the gospels, or to depreciate what they tell, 
but only to put the question on its true basis. Faith in 
the resurrection was not only prevalent but immensely 
powerful before any of our New Testament books was 
written. Not one of them would ever have been written 
but for that faith. It is not this or that in the New 
Testament — it is not the story of the empty tomb, or of 
the appearing of Jesus in Jerusalem or in Galilee — 
which is the primary evidence for the resurrection; it is 
the New Testament itself. The life that throbs in it 
from beginning to end, the life that always fills us again 
with wonder as it beats upon us from its pages, is the 
life which the Risen Saviour has quickened in Christian 
souls. The evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is the 
existence of the Church in that extraordinary spiritual 
vitality which confronts us in the New Testament. This 
is its own explanation of its being. 'He,' says Peter, 
'hath poured forth this which ye both see and hear' 
(Acts 2^^); and, apart from all minuter investigations, it 
is here the strength of the case for the resurrection rests. 
The existence of the Christian Church, the existence of 
the New Testament: these incomparable phenomena in 
human history are left without adequate or convincing 
explanation if the resurrection of Jesus be denied. If 
it be said that they can be explained, not by the resur- 
rection itself but by faith in the resurrection, that raises 
the question, ahready alluded to, of the origin of such 
faith. Does it originate in the soul itself, in memories 
of Jesus, in spiritual convictions about what must have 
been the destiny of a spirit so pure? Or were there 
experiences of another kind, independent historical 
matters of fact, by which it was generated and to which 
it could appeal? Was it, in short, a self-begotten Easter 
Faith, which produced the Easter Message in the way of 
self-support or self-defence; or was there an independent 



I02 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

God-given Easter Message which evoked the Easter 
Faith? We could not ask a more vital question, and 
fortunately there are in the New Testament abundant 
materials to answer it. 

The oldest testimony we have to the resurrection of 
Jesus, apart from that fundamental evidence just alluded 
to as pervading the New Testament, is contained in 
I Cor. 15. The epistle is dated by Sanday * in the 
spring of 55, and represents what Paul had taught in 
Corinth when he came to the city for the first time be- 
tween 50 and 52; but these dates taken by themselves 
might only mislead. For what Paul taught in Corinth 
was the common Christian tradition (ver. 3 ff.); he had 
been taught it himself when he became a Christian, and 
in his turn he transmitted it to others. But Paul became 
a Christian not very long after the death of Christ — 
according to Harnack one year after, to Ramsay three 
or four, to Lightfoot perhaps six or seven.^ At a date 
so close to the alleged events we find that the funda- 
mental facts of Christianity as taught in the primitive 
circle were these — that Christ died for our sins; that He 
was buried; that He rose on the third day and remains 
in the state of exaltation; and that He appeared to cer- 
tain persons. The mention of the burial is important 
in this connexion as defining what is meant by the rising. 
We see from it that it would have conveyed no meaning 
to Paul or to any member of the original Christian circle 
to say that it was the spirit of Christ which rose into new 
life, or that He rose again in the faith of His devoted 
followers, who could not bear the thought that for Him 
death should end all. The rising is relative to the grave 
and the burial, and if we cannot speak of a bodily resur- 
rection we should not speak of resurrection at all. In 

' Encyclopcedia Bihlica, 903 f. 

^ See article 'Chronology' in Hastings Bible Dictionary y i. p. 424. 



THE RESURRECTION 103 

the same connexion also we should notice the specifica- 
tion of the third day. This is perfectly definite, and it 
is perfectly guaranteed. The third day was the first day 
of the week, and every Sunday as it comes round is a 
new argument for the resurrection. The decisive event 
in the inauguration of the new religion took place on 
that day — an event so decisive and so sure that it dis- 
placed even the Sabbath, and made not the last but the 
first day of the week that which Christians celebrated as 
holy to the Lord. The New Testament references to 
the first day of the week as the Lord's day (Acts 20 ^, 
Rev. I ^") are weighty arguments for the historical resurrec- 
tion; that is, for a resurrection which has a place and 
weight among datable events.^ 

An important light is cast on Paul's conception of 
the resurrection of Jesus by his use, in speaking of it, of 
the perfect tense {zyrjyeprat) — 'He hath been raised.' 
Christ rose, it signifies, and remains in the risen state. 
Death has no more dominion over Him. His resurrec- 
tion was not like the raisings from the dead recorded in 
the gospels, where restoration to the old life and its duties 
and necessities is even made prominent, and where the 
final prospect of death remains. Jesus does not come 
back to the old life at all. As risen. He belongs already 
to another world, to another mode of being. The resur- 
rection is above all things the revelation of life in this 
new order, a life which has won the final triumph over 

1 The curious idea, which has now become a tradition among a certain 
class of scholars, that the date of the resurrection is due, not to anything 
which took place on the first day of the week, but to the prophecy of 
Hosea (62) — 'After two days will He revive us; on the third day He will 
raise us up and we shall hve before Him' — ought surely to be disposed 
of by the consideration that there is no allusion to this text in connexion 
with the resurrection, either in the New Testament itself, or (so far as 
the writer is aware) in any other quarter, earlier than the nineteenth 
century. Curious, however, as this idea is, it is not so entirely extraor- 
dinary as Schmiedel's suggestion {Encyclopcedia Biblicay 4067) that 
the date of the resurrection is deduced from 2 Kings 20 *, 



I04 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

sin and death. This was thoroughly understood by the 
original witnesses; the resurrection of Jesus, or the anti- 
cipated resurrection of Christians as dependent upon it, 
was no return to nature and to the life of the world; it 
was the manifestation, transcending nature, of new life 
from God. 

In the passage with which we are dealing, indeed, 
Paul enters into no further particulars of any kind. He 
recites a list of persons to whom Jesus had appeared — 
Cephas, the Twelve, more than five hundred brethren 
at once, James, all the apostles, himself. It is a fair 
inference from the mode of this enumeration that the 
appearances are given in their chronological order, but 
it is quite unwarranted to say * that Paul in this list 
guarantees not only chronological order but completeness. 
The list gives us no ground for saying that when Paul 
was in contact with the Jerusalem Church its testimony to 
the resurrection included no such stories of the appear- 
ing of Jesus to women as are now found in our gospels. 
Neither did the purpose for which Paul adduced this 
series of witnesses require him to do more than mention 
their names as those of persons who had seen the Lord. 
It was the fact of the resurrection which was denied at 
Corinth — the resurrection of Christians, in the first in- 
stance, but by implication, as Paul believed, that of Jesus 
also — and a simple assertion of the fact was what he 
wanted to meet the case. This is adequately given 
when he recites in succession a series of persons to whom 
the Lord had appeared. That he says nothing more 
than that to these persons the Lord did appear is no proof 
that he had nothing more to say. He could, no doubt, 
have told a great deal more about that last appearance 
which the Lord had made to himself, if he had thought 
it relevant; and the probabilities are that in this outline 

' With Schmiedel {Encyclopcedia Biblica, 4058). 



THE RESURRECTION 105 

of his gospel and of the evidence on which it rested, he 
is merely reminding the Corinthians in a summary 
fashion of what he had enlarged upon in all its circum- 
stances and significance when he was among them. The 
term ^fpOt] (He appeared), which is used alike in speaking 
of Christ's appearing to Paul and to the others who had 
the same experience, does not enable us to define that 
experience with any precision. It is used elsewhere, 
certainly, of * visionary' seeing, but it is used equally, for 
example, in Acts 7 ^®, of seeing which is in no sense 
visionary. What it suggests in almost every case is the 
idea of something sudden or unexpected; that which is 
seen is conceived to be so, not because one is looking at 
it or for it, but because it has unexpectedly thrust itself 
upon the sight. The translation 'He appeared,' rather 
than 'He was seen,' adequately represents this. But 
though Paul can use the active form, as in ch. 9^ — 'Have 
not I seen Jesus our Lord?' — neither by that nor by the 
passive does he do more than convey the fact that he had 
had, in what he can only describe in terms of vision, an 
experience in which he was conscious of the presence 
of the Risen Saviour. 

Into this experience we may not be able to penetrate, 
but we are entitled to reject explanations of it which 
assume it to be a mere illusion. Such as it was, it left 
Paul in no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth, who had been 
crucified at Calvary, was exalted to the right hand of God 
in divine power and glory. Power and glory are the 
two words which the apostle most frequently uses in 
speaking of the resurrection. The Risen Jesus is the 
Lord of glory (i Cor. 2 ^). He was declared or consti- 
tuted Son of God in power by the resurrection from the 
dead (Rom. i ^). He was raised from the dead by the 
glory of the Father (Rom. 6*). The working of the 
strength of His might which He wrought in Christ when 



io6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own 
right hand in the heavenly places, far above all princi- 
pality and power and might and dominion, and every 
name that is named not only in this world but also in 
that which is to come — this was the supreme manifesta- 
tion of what the power of God could do. Paul has no 
abstract term like omnipotence, and when he wishes to 
give a practical religious equivalent for it he points to the 
power which has raised Christ from the grave and set 
Him on the throne with all things under His feet. The 
power which has done this is the greatest which the 
apostle can conceive; it is the power which works in us, 
and it is great enough for every need of the soul (Ephes. 
3 ^^ I ^^*). In one passage he uses the expression *the 
body of His glory' (Phil. 3 ^i). The Risen Lord, in con- 
trast with mortal men upon the earth, who bear about a 
*body of humiliation' or 'lowliness,' lives in the splen- 
dour and immortality of heaven. It is no use asking for 
a definition of such words: Paul could no more have 
given them than we can. It is no use asking for an ex- 
planation of the precise relation between the body of 
humiliation and the body of glory; such an explanation 
was entirely out of his reach. All he could have asserted, 
and what he undoubtedly did assert, was that the same 
Jesus whose body had been broken on the cross had 
manifested Himself to him in divine splendour and 
power; and though he should never be able to say any- 
thing about the connexion of the two modes of being 
further than this, that Jesus had been raised from the 
dead by the glory of the Father, it would not in the least 
affect his assurance that the exaltation of Jesus was as 
real as His crucifixion. If any one wished to argue that 
for Paul's belief in the resurrection of Christ, the empty 
tomb in Joseph's garden is immaterial, he might make a 
plausible case; the apostle's certainty of the resurrection 



THE RESURRECTION 107 

rested immediately and finally on the appearing of Jesus 
to himself, and he would have possessed that certainty 
and lived in it though he had never become acquainted 
with the circumstances of the death and burial of Jesus, 
and with the subsequent events as they are recorded in 
the gospels. But the whole of the discussion in the 
fifteenth chapter of ist Corinthians shows that, though a 
plausible case could be stated on these lines, it is not the 
case for which we could claim the support of the apostle 
himself. Unable as he is to explain the relation of the 
natural to the spiritual body, of the body of humiliation 
to the body of glory — a 'mystery' (ver. 51) can only be 
announced, it cannot be explained — his assumption 
throughout is certainly not that the two have nothing to 
do with each other. It is the body of humiliation itself 
which in the case of Christians is transformed and fash- 
ioned like the body of Christ's glory; and it is this, rather 
than the idea that there is no connexion between the two 
bodies, which suggests the line on which the apostle's 
own thoughts would run. 

But what, it may be said, is the value, historically 
speaking, of such evidence as this to the resurrection of 
Jesus? Grant that Paul and the other persons whom 
he enumerates had experiences which they announced 
to the world in the terms, 'We have seen the Lord,' the 
question as to the nature of these experiences remains. 
In the Christian religion one interpretation has been put 
upon them. They have been regarded as historical and 
independent guarantees of a transcendent world, a life 
beyond death, the sovereignty of Jesus, the reconcilia- 
tion of the sinful world and God. But is this interpre- 
tation necessary? No one any longer questions the 
honesty of the apostolic testimony to the resurrection: 
the only question is as to its meaning and value. There 
can be no doubt that appearances did appear to certain 



io8 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

persons; the problem is how are we to give such appear- 
ances their proper place and interpretation in the whole 
scheme of things? Is it not much more probable that 
they are to be explained from within, from the moods 
of thought and feeling in the souls which experienced them, 
than from anything so inconceivable, and so incommen- 
surable with experience, as the intrusion of another world 
into this? Is it not much more probable, in short, that 
they were what philosophers call 'subjective,' states or 
products of the soul itself, and not 'objective,' realities 
independent of the soul? This is not equivalent to 
denying them any reality, though it relieves us from the 
necessity of discussing such questions as the empty 
tomb. Neither does it impair the greatness of Jesus. 
On the contrary, it may even be urged that it magnifies 
Jesus. How great this man must have been who could 
not be extinguished even by death, but who had made 
an impression on the minds of His friends so profound 
and ineffaceable, who had inspired them with faith and 
hope in Himself so vivid and invincible, that He rose in 
their hearts out of the gloom and despair of the cruci- 
fixion to celestial glory and sovereignty! This is a line 
of argument which is constantly and powerfully urged 
at the present time, and that too by many who are far 
from wanting smypathy with the life and teaching of 
Jesus. This is of itself a reason which entitles it to the 
most careful consideration. But it demands attention 
further because it is clear that, if it leaves anything at 
all which can be called Christian religion, it is not that 
form of Christianity which alone we have been able to 
discover in the New Testament. 

Without professing or feeling any undue sympathy 
with the Paley or Old Bailey school of apologetics, we 
may surely have our doubts as to whether the testimony 
of the first witnesses can be so easily disposed of. Prac- 



THE RESURRECTION 109 

tically this estimate of it means that it is to be treated 
as a pathological phenomenon: it belongs to the dis- 
ease and disorder, not to the health and sanity of the 
human spirit. Paul and the other apostles no doubt 
had visions of Jesus in power and glory, but they ought 
not to have had them. Unless their brains had been 
overheated they would not have had them. It can 
never be anything but a pity that they did have them. 
There are people who say such things because their 
philosophy constrains them, and there are people also, 
equally entitled to have an opinion, who would not say 
such things for any philosophy. It is not easy to dis- 
credit offhand, as mere illusion, what has meant so 
much in the life of the human race. It is not easy to 
suppose that men, who in other respects were quite of 
sound mind, were all in this extraordinary experience 
victims of the same delusion. There are, of course, things 
which no testimony could establish; but where there is, 
as here, a great mass of testimony, and that in conditions 
which compel us to treat it seriously, it is, to say the 
least, rash to put upon it an interpretation which annuls 
completely the significance it had for the witnesses them- 
selves. 

It is at this point, therefore, that we must take into 
account those considerations which gave weight from 
the beginning to the apostolic testimony, and won ac- 
ceptance for it. If the resurrection of Jesus could be 
treated purely as a question in metaphysics, and the 
witness of the apostles purely as a question in psychol- 
ogy, we should find ourselves confronted with insoluble 
difficulties. A theory of the universe which had no 
room for the resurrection would find in psychology the 
means of reducing the evidence; those who could not 
reduce the evidence would plead for a more elastic view 
of the universe; but the issue would never be decided. 



110 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

If, however, we leave these abstractions behind us, and 
come face to face with the facts, the situation is entirely 
changed. The resurrection is not attested to meta- 
physicians or psychologists as a thing in itself; it is 
preached to sinful men, in its divine significance for 
their salvation, and it is in this concrete reality alone 
that it exists or has interest for the primitive witnesses. 
'Him hath God exalted with His right hand to be a 
Prince and a Saviour, to give repentance to Israel and 
remission of sins' (Acts 5^*). 'And He charged us to 
preach unto the people, and to testify that this is He 
which is ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and 
dead' (Acts 10 *2). The considerations which are thus 
brought into the scale, it is easy to caricature and easy 
to abuse, but fatal to neglect. Any one who appeals 
to them is sure to be charged with shifting his ground, 

with evading the issue, with lier6.[^a<n^ d<i aUo yivo?^ 

and all the other devices of the apologist at his wits' 
end; nay, he may even be represented as saying to his 
supposed adversary, '7 believe this because I am ac- 
cessible to spiritual considerations, and you disbelieve 
it because you are not; if you were as good a man as I 
am, you would believe it too.' But it is surely possible, 
without being either complacent or censorious, certainly 
without making any personal comparisons, to view the 
testimony to the resurrection not as an abstract or in- 
sulated phenomenon, but in the totality of the relations 
in which it was delivered; and if these relations include 
some which are specifically moral, so that the attitude 
of men to the evidence was from the beginning and 
must ever be, in part at least, morally conditioned, it is 
surely possible to say so without being either a Pharisee 
or an intellectually dishonest man. 

Now there are three ways in which the testimony to 
the resurrection is morally qualified, if one may so speak, 



THE RESURRECTION iii 

and therefore needs to be morally appreciated. In 
the first place, it is the resurrection of Jesus. If the 
witnesses had asserted about Herod, or about any or- 
dinary person, what they did about Jesus, the presump- 
tion would have been all against them. The moral 
incongruity would have discredited their testimony from 
the first. But the resurrection was that of one in whom 
His friends had recognised, while He lived, a power and 
goodness beyond the common measure of humanity, and 
they were sensible when it took place that it was in 
keeping with all they had known, hoped, and believed 
of Him. When Peter is reported to have said that God 
loosed the pangs of death because it was not possible 
that He should be holden of it (Acts 2^^), it is not too 
much to infer that this was the truth present to his mind. 
Is it too much to infer that sometimes, when the resur- 
rection of Jesus is rejected, the rejecter forgets that 
it is this resurrection which is in question? He thinks 
of resurrection in general, the resurrection of any 
one; possibly he thinks of it really as the re-animation 
of a corpse; and he judges quite confidently, and if this 
be all that is in his mind quite rightly, that it is not worth 
while weighing anything so light against a well-founded 
conception of reality in general. But if he realised 
what 'Jesus' means — if he had present to his mind 
and conscience, in His incomparable moral value, the 
Person whose resurrection is declared — the problem 
would be quite different. He might find himself far 
more ready, under the impression of the worth of such 
a person, to question the finality of his scheme of the 
universe; more willing to admit that if there was not to 
be a perpetual contradiction at the heart of things, a 
perpetual extinction of the higher by the lower, such a 
personality must find it possible somehow to transcend 
the limitations of nature and its laws. 



112 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

This consideration, it may be said, is capable of being 
turned in the opposite direction. Those who hold that 
Jesus only rose again in the hearts of His disciples may 
assert that they put to the proper account whatever 
truth it contains. They admit that only Jesus could 
have risen, only a person who had so wonderfully im- 
pressed Himself on the memory and affections of His 
followers; but it was this wonderfully deep and vivid 
impression which itself produced the resurrection. Death, 
for a moment, so to speak, had extinguished Jesus in 
their lives, but the extinction could not be lasting. Very 
soon He reasserted His power. He came to life again 
more triumphant than ever. One may venture to think 
that in all this there is much confusion, and even much 
playing with words, in a style quite unworthy of what 
is at stake. To lose a dear and valued friend is no 
uncommon experience, and we know how to describe 
what follows. Those who do not forget their departed 
friends remember them. But to remember them means 
to recall them as they were; it means to have them pres- 
ent to our minds in the familiar associations of the past. 
We may say if we please that they live in our memory; 
if we have been so unhappy as to forget them, and then 
remember them once more, we may say that they have 
come to life again in our memory; but it is the old fa- 
miliar friend who so comes to life. There is no revela- 
tion here, no suggestion of being in a new and higher 
order, nothing, in spite of the language of life and death 
in which it is expressed, which has any analogy what- 
ever with the resurrection of Jesus. Hence we may say 
confidently that no brooding of His friends on the mem- 
ory of Jesus would have given that revival to His per- 
sonality which they asserted when they preached the 
resurrection. Their sense of the greatness and the 
worth of Jesus, in all probability, would come back 



THE RESURRECTION 113 

on them and fill their minds in the hours which fol- 
lowed His death; but though this prepared them in a 
manner for His appearance, it had no tendency what- 
ever to produce it. Jesus did not appear as they had 
known Him, in the lowliness and familiarity of the 
life they had shared in Galilee; He appeared as one 
exalted to the right hand of God, and having all power 
given Him in heaven and on earth. Their belief that 
such an appearing was no illusion, but the revelation 
of the final truth about Jesus, was morally conditioned, 
no doubt, by their previous knowledge and apprecia- 
tion of Him; but it is hardly short of unmeaning to say 
that their previous knowledge and appreciation of Him 
evoked it in their minds. It was no coming to life again 
in memory of the dear familiar friend whom even death 
could not dislodge from the heart; it was something 
transcendently and unimaginably new, and it needs a 
cause proportioned to it to explain its presence. 

To say that the testimony to the resurrection is mor- 
ally qualified by the mere fact that it is the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus which is attested does not exhaust the 
truth. The apostles did not preach the resurrection of 
Jesus itself as a mere fact; what they preached was the 
gospel of the resurrection. It was the fact read out to the 
mind, heart, and conscience of men in its divine signif- 
icance — the fact and its interpretation as indissolubly 
one, and constituting a supreme appeal on the part of 
God to man. If we could imagine a person to whom 
all the ideas and experiences which for the first witnesses 
were part and parcel of their faith in the exaltation of 
Jesus were meaningless or unreal; a person who had no 
interest in the forgiveness of sins or in judgment to 
come; to whom a life like that of Jesus, ending in a 
death like His, presented no problem, or none that much 
disturbed his soul; to whom it was not a matter of any 
8 



114 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

moment to be assured that sin and death were not the 
final realities in the universe, but were destined to be 
swallowed up in victory — if one could imagine such 
a person, we should have imagined one to whom the 
resurrection must be permanently incredible. He could 
not believe it, because, to begin with, he could not even 
conceive it. He could have no idea of what those who 
attested it had in their minds; and even if he accepted 
something which did not transcend his conception of 
the 'purely' historical, some bare fact with none but a 
metaphysical significance, it would not amount to believ- 
ing in the resurrection in the sense of the New Testa- 
ment. No one can really appreciate the testimony 
unless the moral conditions under which its meaning is 
realised are to some extent real for him. 

It is possible, as has been already noticed, to carica- 
ture this truth on the one side, and to abuse it on the 
other. Those who reject the resurrection caricature it 
when they say that it is a mere evasion, an attempt to 
prove what is either a historical fact or nothing by evi- 
dence which is not historical at all; and those who ac- 
cept the resurrection abuse it when they presume to 
judge others on the ground of it, and insinuate that their 
unbelieving attitude is due to their insensibility to the 
spiritual truths which the gospel of the resurrection 
embodies. But when we bring into view the fact that 
the testimony to the resurrection is morally qualified in 
the way which has just been described, we do not dis- 
regard the testimony itself. The primary fact is that we 
have such testimony. There were really men in the 
world who stood forth before their fellows and said 'We 
have seen the Lord.' That is fundamental, and must 
always be so. There is no attempt to make inward 
evidence take the place of outward — no argument that 
the witness of the Spirit, as theologians have called it, 



THE RESURRECTION 115 

can establish a historical fact; what is asserted is that the 
historical testimony to the resurrection of Jesus is testi- 
mony to a fact of moral significance, a fact of such a kind 
that the testimony to it cannot be duly appreciated, even 
in respect to its credibility, by a person for whom its 
moral significance has no interest. This is not a way of 
asserting that the resurrection is historical, and at the 
same time securing it against historical criticism; it is 
only pointing out, what is surely the case, that the his- 
torical fact with which we are here concerned must 
be taken as what the historical witnesses represent it to 
be, and not as something different — as the concrete and 
significant reality which it was for them, and not as an 
abstract and isolated somewhat, which has no significance 
whatever. Perhaps if 'man' could be reduced to 'his- 
torian' or 'natural philosopher' the resurrection might 
remain for ever a mere puzzle to the brain; all that the 
considerations with which we are here concerned import 
is that this reduction is impossible. 'Man' is more 
than 'natural philosopher' or 'historian.' His relations 
to reality are more various and complex than those of 
such scientific abstractions, and, therefore, his power of 
responding to it, of apprehending and comprehending it, 
is greater. Neither nature nor history is invaded in its 
rights by the resurrection, but both are transcended. 
Neither natural science nor history can deny the resur- 
rection except by claiming for themselves to exhaust the 
truth and reality of the universe — a claim the untruth 
of which is self-evident. It is just because of its moral 
significance — ^because of its meaning and purpose in the 
relations of God and man — that the resurrection, as the 
apostles preached it, rises above what is called the purely 
historical; it makes a kind of appeal to men which a 
purely historical event, if we could realise such an ab- 
straction, never makes; it is on our susceptibility to 



ii6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

this appeal that our appreciation of the testimony to it 
depends, and yet the testimony itself, in the last resort, 
is historical testimony. There would be nothing to go 
upon whatever if there were not men who had seen the 
risen Jesus — here is the point of attachment with history; 
but what the testimony of these men shall amount to for 
us — what weight it shall have in our minds — whether we 
shall take it as simply as it is given, or feel ourselves 
obliged to attempt the reduction of it to something by 
which the equilibrium of our world shall be maintained 
and disturbing revelations excluded — here is the point 
at which the moral elements in the case exert their 
legitimate influence. To see this and to say it is not to 
be Pharisaical, even if one believes in the resurrection. 
It gives no right to judge others. It is necessary, how- 
ever, that the preacher of the resurrection should be 
conscious of it, otherwise he may preach something 
which is out of touch with the apostolic gospel of the 
Risen Christ — something which attempts more than the 
first witnesses attempted, a demonstration of the fact 
apart from its significance; something, too, which is less 
interesting than their message, a fact so emptied of 
divine and human meaning that it defies the intelligence 
instead of appealing to the whole man. 

About the third way in which the evidence for the 
resurrection is morally qualified there can hardly be any 
dispute. If the alleged fact had been insulated in hu- 
man history, if it had been ineffective and fruitless, it 
might well have been questioned whether it were a fact 
at all. But from the very beginning men were per- 
suaded that the resurrection was a fact, because they 
saw it operate as a moral power. It has been said al- 
ready that the supreme evidence for the resurrection is 
the existence of the Church in the fulness of that ex- 
uberant life which we see in the apostolic writings. And 



THE RESURRECTION 117 

this was understood from the first. The sermon of 
Peter in Acts 2 is conscious of all the moral qualifications 
which we have reviewed. The primary historical fact 
of course is that the Lord had appeared to Peter and 
those for whom he spoke: they were witnesses of His 
resurrection. But Peter knew the weight which his 
word would receive from his appreciation of the character 
of Jesus: 'it was not possible that He should be holden 
of death.' He knew the added power with which it 
would tell when the Risen Christ was preached at the 
author of reconciliation to God : ' repent and be baptized 
every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for remission 
of your sins.' He knew that he gave conclusive evidence 
of the exaltation of Jesus when he pointed to the spiritual 
phenomena of the early Christian days: 'He hath poured 
forth this which ye both see and hear.' We must not 
narrow unduly the application of the last words. If we 
thought of nothing but speaking with tongues, and took 
our ideas of this from Paul, we should probably not 
rate it very high. But 'this that ye both see and hear' 
covers the whole phenomena of that eventful time. 
The wonder of it was not that the apostles spoke in 
foreign languages, but that they spoke; men who had 
till then been silent or rather dumb opened their lips, 
and preached with tongues of fire. With great power 
they gave their testimony to the resurrection of the 
Lord Jesus. This is the truly significant thing, the 
transformation of the apostles and the birth of the Church. 
What we think of the apostolic testimony to the resur- 
rection cannot but be influenced by our estimate of 
these moral phenomena and of the mode of their causa- 
tion. The greater they appear, the more valuable 
in their spiritual contents, the more decisive in the his- 
tory of humanity, so much the more inevitable must 
it seem that what lies behind them is not an illusion 



ii8 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

or a morbid experience misunderstood, but the highest 
reality and truth which have ever told vi^ith re- 
generating power on the life of man. Yet here again 
a straightforward mind is bound to guard the argument 
from reproach by making it quite clear that there is no 
desire to evade any historical issue. There are historical 
witnesses: to that we must always recur. The moral 
phenomena to which reference has been made are trans- 
acted on the stage of history. But something in our 
appreciation of the witnesses will always depend on our 
appreciation of the moral phenomena; and it is not 
scientific conscientiousness, but philosophical perversity, 
which tries to ignore the obvious truth. Surely it only 
needs to be stated that the man to whom Christian 
history and the New Testament life are the divinest 
things he can conceive, and the man to whom they are 
meaningless or even pathological phenomena, must take 
different views of what their earliest representatives 
attest as their cause. In this sense, it is fair enough to 
say that belief in the resurrection is a value-judgment. 
But it is not implied, when the word is used in this sense, 
that the resurrection never took place, and that we can- 
not speak of historical evidence in connexion with it. 

It is well worth remarking that in the earliest great 
discussion of this subject — that in the first epistle to the 
Corinthians — Paul does justice to both the historical and 
the spiritual evidence for the resurrection, and sets the 
two in their proper relation to each other. The histori- 
cal evidence comes first. 'He appeared to Peter, then 
to the Twelve ... He appeared to me also.' It cannot 
be repeated too often that this is fundamental. If there 
had not been men who could say this, there would never 
have been such a thing in the world as Christian life, 
with the evidence for the resurrection which it brings. 
Unless the apostolic testimony among men, supported 



THE RESURRECTION 119 

as it was by the spiritual power with which it was de- 
livered, had commanded faith, the Christian religion 
could never have come to be. There is the exaggera- 
tion of paradox in a saying like Mr. Inge's^ that 're- 
ligion, when it confines itself strictly to its own province, 
never speaks in the past tense. It is concerned only 
with what is, not with what was. History as history is 
not its business.* Paul spoke in the past tense when he 
said, *He appeared unto me.' If we drop what was out 
of what is, how much is left? The true case of any one 
who believes in the resurrection is not that 'history as 
history' is not the business of religion; but that, as Paul 
says about older idols, 'history as history' is nothing 
in the world. If Jesus actually rose, as Paul attests 
on the ground that He appeared to him in His exalta- 
tion, we may require to enlarge our conception of the 
historical, but we cannot say that religion and history 
are independent of each other. This is very far from 
the mind of Paul. The apostle never argues that 'the 
real basis of our belief in the resurrection of Christ is 
a great psychological fact — a spiritual experience.' ^ 
The resurrection must certainly be attested, if it is to 
win faith, by witnesses like Peter and Paul who have 
been spiritually transformed by it; if the appearing 
of Jesus had made no difference to them, if it had left 
them the men they were before, no one would have 
believed them when they told He had appeared. But 
testimony does not cease to be testimony when it is 
delivered by men who have been themselves transformed 
by what they attest. The truth does not cease to be 
independently true when its power is demonstrated in 
its moral workings, and we must take care that the desire 
to put Christianity on a basis independent of history, a 

^ In Contentio Veritatis, p. 90. 
* Inge, ut sttpra, p. 87. 



I20 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

basis beyond the reach of historical doubt, does not lead 
us to withdraw from under it the only basis on which it 
has ever been sustained. 

Premising this, however, it is of extreme interest to 
notice how Paul adds to the direct historical testimony 
for the resurrection an indirect spiritual evidence which 
in its place is of the highest value. To put it broadly, 
Christian experience in all its forms implies the resur- 
rection. State the content of this experience as you 
will, take any aspect or illustration of it you please, and 
if you deny the resurrection, instead of being the highest 
and truest form of human life, such experience must be 
considered a thing illegitimate, abnormal, delusive. All 
through his argument Paul employs the reductio ad 
absurdum. At first he states his case quite indefinitely: 
*if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain, and 
your faith is vain too' (i Cor. 15 ^*). Vain, xevov, means 
empty, with nothing in it. Whatever is to be said of 
Paul's preaching, we surely cannot say this. A nature 
so powerful and passionate as his cannot be raised to 
the most intense action, and sustained in it through life, 
by that which has nothing in it. A preaching that so 
stimulated the intelligence of the preacher himself, that 
put the irresistible constraint on him which he so often 
describes,^ that carried away the auditors as it swept 
upon them * in power and in the Holy Spirit, and in much 
assurance' (i Thess. i ^) must have had something in it. 
It must have had behind it a power corresponding in 
character and in force to the effects which it produced 
both in the apostle and his audience; and that power, 
as Paul apprehended it, was the power of the Risen 
Saviour. But the apostle proceeds to give a more special 
point to this general truth. 'If Christ is not raised, your 
faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins.' Vain is in this 

« See I Cor. 9 ", 2 Cor. 5 ^^^•, Acts 18 ^— this last also at Corinth. 



THE RESURRECTION 121 

place t^araia^ not xevjy, futile 01 to no purpose, rather 
than having nothing in it. Your faith means your 
Christianity, your new religion. The great blessing it 
has brought you is, as you imagine, reconciliation to 
God; as believers, you are no longer in your sins; in 
the consciousness of reconciliation to God they are 
annulled both in their guilt and in their power; the re- 
generative pardon of God in Christ has made you new 
creatures. But this regenerative pardon is the par- 
don of God in Christ: it is preached to men in the Risen 
Lord who died for sin, and who sends His spirit to those 
who believe in Him; apart from this Risen Lord it has 
no legitimacy, no reality at all. But who will dare 
to say that the consciousness of reconciliation to God, 
which is the essence of all Christian experience, the 
inspiration of all Christian praise, the spring of all Chris- 
tian life, is no more than an illusion? To Christians, 
at all events, it is more real than anything else which 
human beings call reality, and its reality stands and falls 
with that of the resurrection. There may be morbid 
phenomena in the Christian life, as in life on every plane, 
and no doubt there are; but to say that the Christian 
life itself, in that which is most intimately characteristic 
of it, is nothing but a morbid phenomenon, is too much. 
At all events it was too much for Paul. For him the 
doxologies in which men who were no longer in their 
sins celebrated the living Lord who had redeemed them 
were not wild and whirling words: they were the only 
words in which utterance was given to the final truth of 
life. 

And he has still other ways in which he can press his 
case. If Christ is not risen, 'then they also who have 
fallen asleep in Christ are perished.' Paul had seen 
men fall asleep in Christ. He had watched Stephen stoned, 
and heard him cry, 'Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.* He 



122 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

had seen our poor human nature, in mortal weakness, lay 
hold of the immortal love of God in Christ, and through 
faith in Him triumph over the last enemy. He be- 
lieved that there was nothing on earth so priceless as 
such faith, nothing so real and so honouring to God. 
He could not believe that it was in vain. God would 
be ashamed of such people, to be called their God, unless 
their hope of immortality was made good. He would 
be unworthy of their trust. But such hope was inspired 
by the resurrection of Jesus; it is only through the res- 
urrection it can be satisfied; and therefore for Paul 
who so judges, and for all who share his appreciation of 
the dying Christian's faith, the resurrection is as certain 
as the fidelity of God to those who trust Him even in 
death. The final turn which the apostle gives to his 
argument has been much censured by superior moralists: 
'if in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of 
all men most miserable.' The enlightened multitude 
which has advanced so far as to know that virtue is its 
own reward has been very severe upon this. A man, 
we are told, ought to live the highest life quite irrespective 
of whether there is a life beyond or not. It is hardly 
profitable, however, to discuss the kind of life a man will 
live quite irrespective of conditions. Life is determined 
by the kind of motives which enter into it. If a man 
believes as Paul did in the Risen Christ and in the im- 
mortal life beyond death, motives from that sphere of 
reality will enter into his life here, and give it a new 
character; and it will be time enough to disparage the 
morality of this verse when we find the people who dis- 
pense with the apostolic motive leading the apostolic 
life. That man would be of all men most miserable who 
ran a race for a hope set before him, and found when he 
had reached the goal that he himself and the hope and 
all that had inspired him crumbled into dust. It is in 



THE RESURRECTION 123 

the same temper that the apostle writes immediately 
afterwards: 'If after the manner of men I fought with 
beasts at Ephesus, what doth it profit me? If the dead 
are not raised, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we 
die.' This is not a childish petulance, as if he had said, 
*I will not be good unless I get to heaven'; it is rather 
the passionate expression of the feeling that if goodness 
and all that is identified with it is not finally victorious 
— in a word, is not eternal — there is no such thing as 
goodness at all. If life is bounded by time, men will 
live in one way; if it has an outlook beyond death, they 
will live in another way, for the range and balance of 
their motives will be different. Paul is concerned about 
the Corinthian denial of the resurrection, because it 
seems to him to spring from a moral preference for the 
limited view and the narrower range of motives, a pref- 
erence by which life is inevitably degraded. He does 
not argue that a man who rejects the resurrection is a 
bad man, sensual or petty in his morals, but he does 
assume that the mind of a bad man, whether it be sensual 
or only small, is weighted against the evidence for the 
resurrection; and in that he is undoubtedly right. Such 
a man does not so easily see or sympathize with the 
meaning of the resurrection; he does not relish what it 
stands for, and is so far disqualified from doing justice 
to the evidence on which it rests. 

It is not possible to present the various ways in which 
the evidence for the resurrection is morally qualified 
without saying or assuming things which to some minds 
will seem unfair. But this seeming unfairness is not to 
be imputed to the person who presents the case; it is 
involved in the necessities of every case in which moral 
considerations come into play. If a man can easily 
assume that the Christian consciousness of reconciliation 
to God, the Christian hope of immortality, the Christian 



124 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

devotion of the apostolic life, are things which have no 
proper place in the moral experience of human beings; 
if it is easy for him to argue that they must be eliminated, 
reduced or discounted somehow, to bring the mind to 
moral sanity; if he can seriously think that the New 
Testament is no more than the wonderful monument of 
an immense delusion, he will not easily be persuaded to 
believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Not that he is 
invited to believe in it on the ground of these moral 
phenomena, in the appreciation of which men may con- 
ceivably differ. But with these phenomena present to 
his mind, or rather, as we must say of all moral pheno- 
mena, to his conscience — with some sense of the character 
of Jesus, with some perception of the gospel of the resur- 
rection, the appeal which God makes through it to 
sinful man, with some knowledge of what it has pro- 
duced in human life — he is invited to accept the testimony 
of witnesses who say, * We have seen the Lord.' It is the 
whole of this complex of facts taken together which 
constitutes the evidence for the resurrection; and the 
moral qualifications of it, which the writer has tried to 
explain, may be said at once to impair and to strengthen 
its appeal. They impair it for those whose estimate of 
the moral phenomena involved is low; they strengthen 
it for those whose estimate of these phenomena is high. 
If there were no such phenomena at all — if the alleged 
resurrection of Jesus were an insulated somewhat, with 
neither antecedents nor consequences — no one could 
believe it; that which has neither relations nor results 
does not exist. But the mere fact that the phenomena 
with which the alleged resurrection is bound up are 
moral phenomena, which will be differently appreciated 
by different men, makes it impossible to give a demon- 
stration of it as we give a demonstration in mathematics 
or in natural science. As far as demonstration can be 



THE RESURRECTION 125 

given in history, it is given by the word of credible and 
competent witnesses like Peter and Paul. No historian 
questions that Paul had the experience which he de- 
scribed as seeing the Lord; the open question is, what 
is the worth of the experience which he so describes? 
Was it an illusion? was it the accompaniment of an 
epileptic fit? was it a self -begotten vision of an over- 
heated brain? Or was it a real manifestation of the 
exalted Lord, with all the significance which Paul dis- 
covered in it? There is no value in an offhand answer 
prescribed by the general view of what is or is not possible 
in nature or in history. The only answer which has 
value is that which takes into account, first, the con- 
firmation — if there be such a thing — of the testimony of 
Paul by that of other witnesses; and second, the other 
realities of experience which stand in necessary relation 
to the alleged fact. It is on its estimate of this evidence 
as a whole that the Christian Church has since the be- 
ginning based its faith in the resurrection of Jesus, and the 
writer cannot feel that any philosophy or criticism has di- 
minished in the least its convincing and persuasive power. 
To present the evidence for the resurrection in this 
way will not surprise those who have thought about the 
subject. The broad facts on which the certainty of it 
rests are that it is attested by men who declare that 
Jesus appeared to them, and that it stands in such relation 
to other realities as guarantees that it is itself real. Of 
course this leaves a great many questions unanswered. 
It does not tell us anything we can realise as to the mode 
of being in which Jesus appeared: it does not enable 
us to interpret the appearances scientifically, and to 
relate the Risen Saviour to the constitution and course 
of nature with which we are familiar. The original 
witnesses like Paul never bring Him back into this 
world, so as to be a part of it as He was before death; 



126 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

His appearing is the revelation of a transcendent life, 
and of another world which eludes the resources of 
physical science. But it is on the broad foundation of 
the certainty which the resurrection of Jesus had for 
Paul, and which it has for all who accept the primitive 
testimony in the large scope given to it above, that we 
have to investigate such narratives of the appearings of 
Jesus, and of His intercourse with His disciples, as we 
find in the synoptic gospels and the book of Acts. 
Though we should find these full of difficulties which 
elude all attempts at explanation — nay, though there 
should turn out to be features in them to which we could 
not assign any historical value — our faith in the resur- 
rection, firmly established beforehand on its proper basis, 
would not be disturbed. We should know less than we 
thought we did about how the resurrection life was mani- 
fested, but we should be as sure as ever that the mani- 
festation was made, and that is all in which we are 
concerned. 

The strict sequence of the argument, therefore, does 
not require us to enter into such details, but they have 
been so prominent in most discussions of the resurrec- 
tion that it is worth while to refer to them in passing. 
The principal difficulties have been found in connexion 
with three features in the narratives. The first concerns 
the sequence of the appearances of Jesus; the second, 
the progressive materialising, or what is alleged to be 
such, in the representations of the Risen One; and the 
third, the place of His appearing. 

As for the first, it has to be frankly admitted that no 
one has ever succeeded in constructing a harmony which 
combines without inconsistency or contradiction all that 
we read in the Gospels, in Acts, and in ist Corinthians, 
on this subject. He who wishes to see the best case 
that can be stated for the accuracy and credibility of the 



THE RESURRECTION 127 

New Testament witnesses may find it in the Essay of 
Dr. Chase * ; he who wishes to see the strongest case 
that can be made against them may consult Schmiedel's 
article in the Encydopcedia Biblica. ^ Whether the time 
over which these appearings extended were longer or 
shorter — and everything in the New Testament favours 
the idea that it was comparatively short — it must have 
been a time of intense excitement for all concerned. The 
agitation of the actors, their emotions, their amazement, 
incredulity, fear, joy, are vividly reflected in the stories. 
If their depositions had been taken on oath immediately 
afterwards, it is certain that discrepancies in detail would 
have appeared; but no one who knows what evidence is 
would ^maintain that discrepancies of this kind discredit 
the main fact which is attested. We do not know how 
soon accounts of the resurrection appearances of Jesus 
began to be put on record; but, as has been already ob- 
served, the gospels as we have them were not written 
till after the death of Paul, and it was too late then to 
find out with any precision how this or that appearing 
preserved in tradition was related in time to the others. 
The series in ist Corinthians xv. is no doubt chrono- 
logical, but it does not profess to be complete, and it 
leaves us perfectly free to combine other appearances 
with those it records as best we can. One of the great- 
est difficulties connected with the temporal aspect of the 
resurrection is that which rises out of the apparent incon- 
sistency of one and the same writer — the author of the 
third gospel and of Acts. The first impression left upon 
the mind by the gospel is that it was on the day of the 
resurrection itself that Jesus appeared to the two dis- 
ciples on His way to Emmaus, to Peter, and to the com- 
pany in Jerusalem; and that on that same day, after 

* Cambridge Theological Essays. 

^Resurrection and Ascension Narratives, vol. iv. 4039 ff. 



128 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

giving this company His final charge, He led them out 
to Bethany and there parted from them with blessing 
(and ascended into heaven). But this, notoriously, is 
not what we find in Acts. There the parting and the 
ascension at Bethany do not take place till six weeks 
after the resurrection. It is not easy to believe that 
Luke, in writing the sequel to his gospel which he had 
in view from the beginning, which is indeed only the 
second chapter of the same work, and which was in all 
probability produced continuously with it, was conscious 
of any such inconsistency in his own mind. He did not 
write for people who knew nothing of his story, but for 
a circle — for his work was never intended for Theophilus 
alone — which was acquainted with him and the tradition 
he represented; and not to insist on the fact that a day 
of impossible length would be required to take in all the 
events of the last chapter of the gospel, the probabilities 
are that its earliest readers, who may never have read it 
apart from Acts, knew that its closing section was essen- 
tially an abridgment or summary, and that whether it was 
to be interrupted at this point or that — after ver. 43 or 
after ver. 49 — it covered a much longer period than twelve 
or eighteen hours. There is much to be said for the 
idea that in the last verses of the gospel Luke condenses 
into a few lines what he is able in the opening of Acts 
to expand in some detail, just as in the last verses of 
Acts he condenses into a sentence two whole years of 
PauPs preaching in Rome, which he would have expanded 
in a third book had he been able to bring his history 
of Christianity down to a provisional termination with 
the fall of Jerusalem and the death of his two great 
figures, Peter and Paul. But however this may be, 
no chronological difficulty impairs in the slightest de- 
gree the value of the testimony to the resurrection on 
which faith has rested from the first. We see how such 



THE RESURRECTION 129 

difficulties would arise; we see how inevitably they must 
have arisen; and seeing this we know how to discount 
them. 

Many have felt the second class of difficulties more 
serious — those arising out of the progressive materialisa- 
tion of the appearances of Jesus. At first, it is said, He 
only appears; and the visionary reality of an appearance 
is not to be disputed. Appearances do appear, however 
they are to be interpreted. It is a step further when the 
appearance speaks. Still, speaking is only the counter- 
part of hearing, and as hearing may be as inward and 
subjective as seeing, the speaking also may be allowed to 
pass as a way of representing one aspect of the experi- 
ence. This, it may be said, is all the length we are 
carried by Paul. He saw the Lord, and the Lord spoke 
to him, but there is nothing materialistic in this. He 
does, indeed, speak of His body, but it is the body of His 
glory (Phil. 3 ^^) — that incorruptible spiritual body into 
the likeness of which He will change the body of our 
humiliation; not a body of flesh and blood, which cannot 
inherit the Kingdom of God. We might conceive the 
Risen Saviour saying to Thomas, 'Reach hither thy 
finger and see My hands; and reach hither thy hand and 
put it into My side; and be not faithless, but believing': 
we might conceive this in consistency with Paul, for the 
body of His glory is the body in which He suffered, 
changed as we shall be changed when this corruptible has 
put on incorruption. But can we, in consistency with 
Paul's doctrine of the resurrection body, conceive Jesus 
saying, 'Handle Me and see, for a spirit hath noi flesh 
and hones as ye behold Me having'? Can we conceive 
that He took a piece of broiled fish and ate it before the 
disciples (Luke 24^^"*^)? It is not wanton to ask such 
questions: they rise involuntarily in the mind, and we 
have no choice but to face them. One way of doing so 
9 



I30 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

is to argue that the only reality in the resurrection stories 
is that of visionary appearances of Jesus, and that every- 
thing else in the gospel record is to be explained as the 
effort of those who believed in these appearances to per- 
suade others to believe in them — the effort to exhibit 
them as so indubitably and convincingly real that no one 
would be able to refuse his faith. But reality for the 
popular mind is that which is demonstrable to the senses; 
it is material reality; and hence the proof of the resur- 
rection is more and more materialised. The first step in 
this process of materialisation is the introduction of the 
empty grave: the real proof of the resurrection, such as 
it is, had originally nothing to do with the grave; it was 
the quiet independent fact that Jesus had appeared be- 
yond the grave. To the empty tomb one infallible sign 
was added after another — conversations, the hands and 
the side, the flesh and the bones, and at last the crudity 
of eating and drinking. It is a strong argument against 
this way of explaining all these phenomena that if this be 
their genesis, it has left no trace of its motive in the New 
Testament. The empty tomb comes before us only as 
a fact, not as an argument. It is never referred to as 
throwing light either on the character or the reality of 
the resurrection, though it is assumed, of course, in 
Matthew 28, that if the Jews had been able to produce 
the body of Jesus the evidence for the resurrection would 
have been destroyed. It is not easy to dispute this 
assumption. The confidence of the disciples in their 
Master's victory over death could not be without relation 
to His victory over the grave. They did not believe 
that He would rise again at the last day, they believed 
from the very beginning that He had risen again already; 
and it is merely incredible that with such a faith inspiring 
them they never so much as thought of the grave, or had 
not a moment of trouble in reconciling to their belief in 



THE RESURRECTION 131 

the resurrection of Jesus the demonstration given by the 
grave, if His body still lay there, that He too saw cor- 
ruption. The empty grave is not the product of a naive 
apologetic spirit, a spirit not content with the evidence 
for the resurrection contained in the fact that the Lord 
had appeared to His own and had quickened them unto 
new victorious life; it is not the first stage in a process 
which aims unconsciously as much as voluntarily at 
making the evidence palpable, and independent, as far as 
may be, of the moral qualifications to which we have 
already adverted; it is an original, independent and un- 
motived part of the apostolic testimony. The whole 
mysteriousness of the resurrection is in it; in combina- 
tion with the appearances of Jesus, and with all that 
flowed from them, it brings us to a point at which the 
resources of science are exhausted, the point at which the 
transcendent world revealed in the resurrection touches 
this world, at once enlarging the mind and bringing it to 
a stand. This mysteriousness attaches to all that we read 
in the gospels of the appearances of Jesus — His coming 
and going, His form, as it is called in Mark 16^^, His 
showing of His hands and His side; but whether it can 
be extended in any way to His eating may well seem 
doubtful. Meats for the belly and the belly for meats, 
Paul says, and God shall destroy both it and them. 
Eating is a function which belongs to the reality of this 
life, but not to that of immortality; and there does seem 
something which is not only incongruous but repellent in 
the idea of the Risen Lord eating. It makes Him real 
by bringing Him back to earth and incorporating Him 
again in this life, whereas the reality of which His res- 
urrection assures us is not that of this life, but of another 
life transcending this. The eating is only mentioned 
by Luke (Gospel, 24^^^-, Acts i *, io*0> and when 
we consider the fact, which a comparison with the other 



132 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

gospels renders unquestionable, that Luke everywhere 
betrays a tendency to materialise the supernatural, it is 
not too much to suppose that this tendency has left 
traces on his resurrection narrative, too. But though we 
have to discount this, the resurrection itself, as the reve- 
lation of life in another order, is not touched. It only 
means that we do not assign to the resurrection life, 
which has a higher reality of its own, that same kind of 
reality, with all its material conditions and limitations, 
with which we are familiar in this world. To reject the 
eating is not to reject the resurrection life of Jesus, it is 
to preserve it in its truth as a revelation of life at a new 
level — life in which eating and drinking are as inappro- 
priate as marrying or giving in marriage. 

We now come to the third of the difficulties con- 
nected with the gospel narratives of the resurrection, 
that which concerns the place of Jesus' appearing. If 
we take the gospels as they stand, and attempt to har- 
monise them, we may think at first that there are suf- 
ficient facilities for doing so. If in Matthew Jesus 
appears to His disciples only in Galilee, and in Luke 
only in Jerusalem, in John He appears to them in both; 
and it may seem reasonable to apply to difficulties about 
space the same considerations which have abready enabled 
us to discount the difficulties about time. But a closer 
scrutiny reveals to us that in their representation of the 
scene of Jesus' appearances the evangelists do not differ 
from each other merely as men might differ who were 
recording the testimony of agitated observers. In this 
case there might no doubt be divergences, but they 
would be of an accidental character; they would explain 
themselves, or would need no explanation. What we 
find in the gospels is far more conscious, deliberate, and 
serious than this, and there is something perplexing, 
not to say disconcerting about it, until we understand 



THE RESURRECTION 133 

the evangelists' point of view. What are the facts, 
then, under this head, and how are we to look at them? 
In the gospel according to Matthew, ch. 26 ^^ ^' , we 
have the remarkable word of Jesus spoken to His dis- 
ciples as they left the upper room for the garden of 
Gethsemane. 'All ye shall be offended in Me this 
night; for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the 
sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad. But after 
I am raised up, I will go before you into Galilee.' This 
is not the only passage, as we shall afterwards see, in 
which Jesus predicts His resurrection, but it is the only 
one in which He connects it with the immediate future 
of His disciples, and gives what is in a sense the pro- 
gramme of His appearances. There is no reason to 
suppose that Jesus did not speak these words. It is not 
always safe to lean on internal evidence, but the truly 
poetic conception of the Good Shepherd rallying His 
dispersed flock and going before them (cf. John 10*) to 
the old familiar fields is at least in keeping with the 
occasion and its mood. The evangelist certainly takes 
the words seriously, and his resurrection narrative car- 
ries out the scheme which they suggest. When the 
women visit the tomb on the first day of the week, an 
angel says to them: 'Go quickly, and tell His disciples 
that He has risen from the dead; and behold He goeth 
before you into Galilee; there shall ye see Him' (Matt. 
28 ^) . The same message is repeated by Jesus when He 
appears to these women on their way to execute the charge 
of the angel: 'Go tell My brethren that they depart into 
Galilee, and there shall they see Me' (Matt. 28 ^^). It is 
not necessary to consider whether verses 9 and 10 are no 
more than a 'doublet' of what precedes — the tradition 
of the same fact in another form; the point is that this 
is the programme which is carried out in the first gospel. 
The eleven disciples departed into Galilee (v. 16), and 



134 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

saw Jesus there. There also they received the great 
commission, Go and make disciples of all nations. Not 
only is there no appearance of Jesus to the disciples at 
Jerusalem, but any such appearance is carefully excluded. 
The disciples are promptly directed away from Jersualem 
— go quickly and tell them — both by the angel and by 
Jesus, and we must assume that they left at once. As 
far as they are concerned the appearing of Jesus is an 
experience which is connected with Galilee alone. 

If we turn to the gospel of Mark, we find there also, 
at ch. 14^^, the prophetic words of Jesus quoted above. 
It can hardly be doubted that for him also, as for Mat- 
thew, they determined the character of his resurrection 
narrative. He reproduces them in his account of what 
took place at the grave. The angel says to the woman. 
Go tell His disciples and Peter that He goeth before you 
into Galilee: there shall ye see Him, as He said unto you. 
The gospel of Mark, like everything in the New Testa- 
ment, was written by a believer in the resurrection; and 
it is inconceivable that it broke off without the fulfilment 
of this programme. The consternation of the women 
described in verse 8 — 'And they went out and fled from 
the tomb: for trembling and astonishment had come 
upon them; and they said nothing to any one; for they 
were afraid' — is not the end of the story; and in spite 
of the ingenious comment of Wellhausen can never have 
been the end of it. As it stands at present, the gospel 
according to Mark records no appearance of Jesus what- 
ever; but it is no rash assumption that with the same 
prophetic intimation as Matthew (Mark i4 28=Matt. 
26^^), and the same or an even more emphatic repro- 
duction of it by the angel at the tomb (Mark 16 ^=Matt. 
28^), the original conclusion ran on the same lines as 
that of our first gospel. The fear-stricken women may 
have been met, as in Matthew, and reassured by the 



THE RESURRECTION 135 

Risen Jesus Himself; and when they did their errand 
the eleven would start for Galilee and see the Lord 
there. Indeed, the relation of the two evangelists is 
such that the only plausible construction of the facts is 
that the last chapter of Matthew, barring what is said 
about bribing the soldiers, which corresponds to a pas- 
sage earlier in Matthew and with no parallel in Mark, 
is based throughout on Mark's original conclusion. Had 
this been preserved, it would have answered to Matt. 
28 ^^'^^; that is, it would have given a Gaiilaean appear- 
ance of Jesus to the eleven, and would have excluded an 
appearance at Jerusalem. 

When we turn to Luke, it is of the first importance to 
remember that he wrote with Mark before him. It is 
not possible here to give the proof of this; but though 
there are still scholars who hold that the evangelists had 
no literary relation to one another, and that each wrote 
immediately and only from oral tradition, the writer can 
only express his own conviction of the entire inadequacy 
of any such view to do justice to the phenomena. As- 
suming, therefore, that Luke knew Mark, we notice in 
the first place that he does not give the words of Jesus 
on leaving the upper room. There is nothing about the 
smiting of the shepherd, the scattering of the flock, the 
rising and going before into Galilee. This is not because 
Luke was ignorant of the words, or accidentally over- 
looked them, for we can see when we come to his resur- 
rection narrative that the sound of them was in his ears. 
His two angels say to the women, 'He is not here, but 
is risen; remember how He spake unto you while He 
was yet in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be 
delivered up into the hands of sinful men, and be cruci- 
fied, and the third day rise again.' Here a general re- 
ference to Jesus' predictions of His death and resurrection, 
made while He was yet in Galilee, is substituted for the 



136 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

direction to the disciples to go into Galilee and meet 
Him there. We may say 'substituted' without hesita- 
tion; for there is nothing accidental about it. Luke 
had what he thought sufficient reasons for omitting 
altogether what he read in Mark 14^^^; and for giving 
what he read in Mark 16 ' an entirely different turn. A 
reader unfamiliar with the minute comparison of the 
gospels may think these reckless statements, but no one 
who has been at pains to examine the way in which 
Luke habitually makes use of Mark will find any diffi- 
culty in them. The only question they raise is, Can we 
find out the reasons on the strength of which Luke felt 
entitled or bound to treat these passages as he has done ? 

The answer is obvious. Luke omitted or modified 
these passages because they connected the appearances 
of the Risen Jesus with Galilee, whereas everything he 
had to tell about Him was connected with Jerusalem. 
Hence he not only records appearances only at Jeru- 
salem or in its vicinity, but he takes as much pains to 
confine the disciples to Jerusalem as Matthew takes to 
get them away. The women do not, as in Matthew, 
see Jesus on the way from the tomb, but He appears 
on the very day of the resurrection to Cleophas and his 
friend, to Peter, and to the eleven and those with them. 
He bids them, apparently on this occasion, continue in 
the city until they are clothed in power from on high 
(24*^). They are not only not represented as going to 
Galilee and seeing Jesus there, according to His command- 
ment: His commandment is reversed; they are forbidden 
to leave Jerusalem; and it is there, and not amid the 
scenes of His early fellowship with them, that they receive 
the great commission. These are the facts: what do 
they signify, and how are they to be explained ? 

If we were merely dealing with texts, the relation of 
which to reality was indeterminable except from them- 



THE RESURRECTION 137 

selves, we might be hopelessly baffled. We should have 
to say that both these ways of representing the case 
could not be true, and that quite possibly neither was. 
If one witness says, Jesus appeared to His disciples in 
Galilee only, not in Jerusalem; and another, He ap- 
peared to them in Jerusalem only, not in Galilee; the 
temptation is strong to say that we cannot depend on 
anything that is said about His appearing. But here it 
is necessary to remember the evidence for the resurrec- 
tion which is quite independent of Matthew and Luke. 
Those manifestations of the Risen Saviour which in 
themselves and in the spiritual quickening which accom- 
panied them created the Christian Church and the New 
Testament retain their original certainty even under the 
extreme supposition that we can make nothing what- 
ever of the testimony of the evangelists. But there is 
no need even to contemplate a case so extreme. The 
faith of the evangelists themselves did not rest on the 
isolated stories they told of the appearing of Jesus, 
whether in one place or another; it rested where such 
faith must always rest, on the basis of the apostolic 
testimony in general, and on the powerful working in 
the Church of the spirit sent from Christ. The apostolic 
testimony, however, was much broader and more com- 
prehensive than anything we find in the evangelists, as 
a glance at i Corinthians 15 *"® is sufficient to show. Of 
this, the writer believes, the evangelists themselves 
were as well aware as we; they could not have been 
ignorant of a tradition which was common, when Paul 
wrote, to all Christendom — handed over to him at Jeru- 
salem, and by him transmitted to the Gentile churches. 
The question suggested by the phenomena of the gospels 
accordingly takes another form. It is not, How are we 
to believe in the resurrection in face of the indubitable 
and intentional inconsistencies of Matthew and Luke? 



138 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

but, What was the interest which guided an evangelist 
in what he wrote about the resurrection? What did he 
conceive to be his duty in this matter, and how were 
Matthew and Luke led to do their duty in a way which 
at first sight is so disconcerting to the reader ? 

In view of the facts which have just been presented, it 
is not too rash to suggest that in their resurrection nar- 
ratives the evangelists did not conceive themselves to 
be stating systematically or exhaustively the evidence 
for the resurrection. Not that these narratives are not 
evidence, but, as the writers must have been aware, they 
are quite inadequate to represent the evidence as a 
whole. The aim of the various writers — their concep- 
tion of an evangelist's function — seems rather to have 
been this: believing in the resurrection themselves, and 
writing for those who believed in it, they aimed at giving 
such an account of it as should bring out its permanent 
significance for the Church. The main thing in all the 
resurrection narratives in the gospels is the appearing of 
Jesus to the eleven, and His final charge or commission. 
This is obviously the case in Matthew, where apart from 
the appearance to the women in ch. 28 ^^-j which is only 
used to prepare for this, there is no other manifestation 
of Jesus at all. To the writer, it is not doubtful that in 
the original form of Mark it would have been the same. 
Even the later conclusion to Mark, which mentions 
appearances to Mary of Magdala and to 'two of them 
as they walked, on their way into the country,' has no- 
thing to tell of these borrowings from Luke and John; 
in keeping with the true conception of a gospel narrative 
it enlarges only on the appearance to the eleven, and on 
what Jesus said to them. Luke, no doubt, in his exquisite 
story of the two disciples at Emmaus, represents the 
Lord as mterpreting to them in all the Scriptures the 
things concerning Himself, but he too concentrates 



THE RESURRECTION 139 

attention on an appearance to the eleven and on the 
great commission given on that occasion. If we leave 
out of account the supplementary twenty-first chapter, 
and regard the fourth gospel as closing according to 
the original intention of the writer with' ch. 20 ^S we 
see that there also the same holds good. What John is 
interested in is to be seen in ch. 20 ^^'^^ Incidentally 
an evangelist might mention this or that with regard to 
an appearing of Jesus to an individual; he might tell 
expressly that He was seen of Mary Magdalene, as John 
does; or of more women than one, as Matthew does; 
he might imply, without expressly telling, or having any 
details to tell, that He had appeared to Peter, as Luke 
does; but it was not in these incidents that he was inter- 
ested, and it is not on the precision of his knowledge 
as to their time, place, or circumstances, that his belief in 
the resurrection or his sense of its significance depends. 
The one main thing is that Jesus appeared to the dis- 
ciples, the men whom He had chosen to be with Him, 
and whom He had trained to continue His work; and 
that in His intercourse with these chosen men their 
minds were opened to the meaning of the resurrection 
both for Him and for themselves. His greatness rose 
upon them as it had never done in the days of His flesh. 
They became conscious of His exaltation, of His entrance 
into the sphere of the divine. They saw Him seated at 
the right hand of God. He had all power given to Him 
in heaven and on earth, and in the strength of this ex- 
altation He sent them forth to win the world for Him. 

It is not in the least improbable — or so, at least, it 
seems to the writer — that in the great appearing of Jesus 
to the eleven recorded in all the gospels (Matt. 28 ^^'^^, 
Mark 16 ""»«, Luke 24 ^«-^^ John 20^^-23) we have not 
the literal record of what took place on a single occasion, 
but the condensation into a representative scene of all 



I40 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

that the appearances of Jesus to His disciples meant. 
These appearances may well have been more numerous 
— with I Cor. 15 in our hands we may say quite freely 
that they were more numerous — than the evangelists 
enable us to see; but it is not separate appearances, nor 
the incidental phenomena connected with them, nor the 
details of time and place, in which the evangelists and 
the Church for which they write are interested. It is 
the significance of the resurrection itself. If for the pur- 
pose of bringing out this significance the whole manifes- 
tation of Jesus to His disciples was condensed into a 
single representative or typical scene, and if Jesus never- 
theless had in point of fact appeared in different places, 
we can understand how one evangelist should put this 
typical scene in Galilee and another in Jerusalem. When 
we see what is being done we should rather say that 
both are right than that either is wrong. If the gospel 
according to Matthew rests on the authority of an original 
disciple of Jesus, it is very natural that he should make 
Galilee the scene of the appearing; Galilee, as we have 
seen, had been prepared for by the word of Jesus, and 
it would be endeared by old associations. Luke, on the 
other hand, knew Christianity only as a faith which had 
its cradle and capital at Jerusalem, and it was as natural 
that he should put the representative appearing there. 
In either case, however, it is a representative appearing 
that is meant, and with whatever relative right it is located 
in Jerusalem or in Galilee, it is not in the location that 
the writer's interest lies. It is in the revelation which is 
made of the exaltation of Jesus and the calling of the 
Church. This, too, has a representative character, as is 
evident from the fact that, though the meaning is sub- 
stantially the same in all the gospels, the language in 
which it is conveyed is surprisingly different. If we com- 
pare the words which Jesus speaks in the four passages 



THE RESURRECTION 141 

just referred to — all of which unquestionably serve the 
same purpose in the gospels in which they respectively 
stand — it is evident that we have no literal report of words 
of the Lord. We have an expression of the significance of 
His exaltation for Himself and for the Church. What 
this significance was we have considered already in speak- 
ing of the place of Christ in the faith of the synoptic evan- 
gelists; it covered their assurance that He was Lord of all, 
that He was exalted a Prince and a Saviour, that forgive- 
ness was to be preached to all men in His name; it in- 
cluded the gift of the Holy Spirit and His own spiritual 
presence. This is what an evangelist is concerned to 
attest, and if the difficulties which a literal and formal 
criticism finds in his narrative had been presented to him, 
the probability is that he would not have taken them 
seriously. He might cheerfully have admitted that with a 
perfectly honest mind he had been mistaken about a detail 
here or there; but that he had been mistaken about the 
main thing — that the Lord had appeared to His own, 
and that this great commission was what His appearing 
signified — he could not possibly admit. Nor need we. 
The resurrection is not attested in the gospels by out- 
side witnesses who had inquired into it as the Psychical 
Research Society inquires into ghost stories; it is at- 
tested — in the only way in which it can be attested at 
all — by people who are within the circle of realities to 
which it belongs, who share in the life it has begotten, 
and who therefore know that it is, and can tell what it 
means. To see this is to get the right point of view for 
dealing with the difficulties in the narratives; it is not 
too much to add, that it takes away from these difficulties 
any religious importance. Whether we can tell precisely 
how they originated or not, the testimony of the apostles 
and the Church to the resurrection is unimpaired: Jesus 
lives in His exaltation, and He holds from the beginning in 



142 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

the faith of His disciples that incomparable place which 
He can never lose. 

The question with which we are ultimately concerned 
— whether the Christian faith which we see in the New 
Testament has a basis of fact sufficient to sustain it — is 
in part answered by what has now been said. The New 
Testament life would have no sufficient basis, indeed it 
would never have been manifested in history, but for 
the resurrection. It is in a sense the fulfilment of the 
word of Jesus in the fourth gospel: Because I live, ye 
shall live also; we could never have seen or known it if 
the creed had ended, as some people think a Christian 
creed might end, with 'crucified, dead, and buried.' But 
though without the resurrection the New Testament 
attitude to Christ would have no justification, and would 
in point of fact be plainly impossible, the resurrection, 
taken by itself, is not that complete historical justifica- 
tion of Christianity which our ultimate question had in 
view. The resurrection is the resurrection of Jesus, and 
though it lifts Jesus, as it were, into His place of incom- 
municable greatness, it is this Person and no other who 
is thus transcendently exalted, and there must be some 
inner relation between what He is and what He was. 
There must be some proportion between the life which 
He now lives at God's right hand, and that which He 
lived among men upon the earth; there must, if Chris- 
tian faith is to be vindicated, be some congruity between 
His present significance for God and man, as faith appre- 
hends it, and that which can be traced in His historical 
career. It is in the life He lived on earth that His mind 
is mainly revealed to us; and if His mind, as we there 
come in contact with it — His mind, in particular, with 
regard to Himself, and the significance of His being and 
work in the relations of God and man — did not stand in 
essential relation to the believing Christian attitude 



THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 143 

towards Him, we should feel that Christian faith, his- 
torically speaking, had an insecure foundation. The 
New Testament estimate of Christ can only be vindi- 
cated if we can show that the historical Person, whose 
resurrection is attested by the apostles, explicitly or 
virtually asserted for Himself, during His life in the world, 
a place in the relations of God and man as incommu- 
nicable and all-determining as that which we have seen 
bestowed upon Him in the primitive Christian books. 
The question, therefore, we have now to answer is. What 
do we know of Jesus? In particular, what place — in 
His own apprehension — did Jesus fill in the relations of 
men to God? 



II 

THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 

(a) Preliminary critical considerations. 

In proposing this question for discussion, at least in 
the second and more definite form, we encounter the 
same preliminary objections which confronted us in 
deahng with the resurrection. There are those for whom 
it is not a question at all, and who therefore will not 
seriously raise it. To ask what place Jesus filled in 
the relations of God and men contemplates the possi- 
bility of finding that He did fill some place of peculiar 
interest and importance — the possibility, to put it ex- 
tremely, that He was and is to both God and man what 
no other can be, and that all divine and human relations 
are determined by Him; and this is a possibility which 
principle does not allow them to contemplate. Jesus was 
a historical character, they argue; and there cannot be 
in history a man whose relations to God and his kind 



144 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

are essentially different from those of other men. A 
man may be a great spiritual genius, through whom 
the realities and possibilities of the spiritual life are 
revealed to others, but no man can be so identified with 
the truth which he reveals as that if he were lost it would 
be lost also. Plausible as this may seem, it is an d priori 
settlement of a question which insists on being settled 
otherwise. The only reason we have for raising the 
question is that Jesus has, in point of fact, from the 
very beginning, had a place assigned to Him by Chris- 
tian faith which is distinct in kind from that assigned to 
other men; He has been believed to be, both to God 
and to the human race, what no other is or can be. After 
what has been said in the earlier part of this discussion, 
we cannot think this statement of the facts open to ques- 
tion, and we do not feel at liberty to decide d. priori that 
the Christian faith from the beginning was a complete 
mistake. There may have been grounds for giving Jesus 
His incomparable place. It may not have been an irra- 
tional enthusiasm, but the irresistible compulsion of fact 
in His character. His personality, His attitude and claims, 
that made His followers exalt Him as they did. No 
dogmatic preconception as to what is possible or impossible 
in the field of history can exempt us from the duty of in- 
quiring into the facts. The very men who were the first 
to have their religious life so absolutely determined by 
Jesus once thought of Him as only a neighbour, another 
like themselves. But they came to think of Him very dif- 
ferently, and it is not for the historian to decide per- 
emptorily and off-hand that they were wrong; his func- 
tion is rather to inquire what it was in Jesus which changed 
their attitude to Him. Even if he could not find out, he 
would have no right to say that the change was gratuitous or 
irrational. He could only say it awaited explanation. 
What we have to do, therefore, is to get at the facts 



THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 145 

in the most unprejudiced way we can. The difficulties 
in the way of doing so are not to be ignored, but neither 
are they to be exaggerated. Exaggerated they un- 
doubtedly are by those who point to the general char- 
acter of the gospels, and infer from it the impossibility 
of using them with confidence for any historical purpose. 
History, as Quintilian says, is written ad narrandum, non 
ad prohandum — to tell a story, not to make out a case. 
But the gospels are written to make out a case. This is 
avowed by the writer of the fourth; his case is that Jesus 
is the Christ, the Son of God; and he writes that men may 
beHeve this, and that believing they may have Hfe in 
His name (John 20^^). It is the case of the others also, 
and though they do not state it so explicitly, they are 
none the less under the influence of it while they write. 
It is not so much that they deliberately misrepresent facts, 
as that facts are unconsciously transformed in their 
minds to suit their case. Stories grow, are amplified, 
heightened, illumined, made demonstrative. Jesus, in 
the only documents to which we can appeal, is presented in 
a r61e, that of the Messiah, and in every situation He acts 
up to the part. All the gospels represent stages in the 
idealising of their hero, a process which began, no doubt, 
in the imagination of His enthusiastic disciples even 
while He lived, but which received an irresistible and in- 
calculable impulse when He rose from the dead. The 
glory of His exaltation was reflected upon His earthly 
career; it was manifested in works, words, and experiences 
answering to the greatness of the Messiah, and of the hopes 
associated with Him. What, therefore, we are enabled 
to trace by the help of the gospels, is not so much the 
history of Jesus as *the history of the faith of ancient 
Christendom during the first half century of its exist- 
ence.'* The gospels are not historical sources; they 

* J. Weiss, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, 36. 
10 



146 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

axe documents which reflect 'the faith and tlje religious 
imagination of the early churches.' ^ It is more than 
seventy years now since Strauss in his Life of Jesus gave 
the first systematic expression to this general mode of ap- 
preciating the evangehc narratives, and it has been echoed 
in writers whose name is Legion down to the present hour. 
In the precise form which its author gave it, the mythical 
theory may have been dissipated or reduced to insignifi- 
cant proportions; but in the mental attitude to the gos- 
pel history which is here in view — an attitude which has 
■prevailed widely for two generations, and is at the present 
moment perhaps more prevalent than ever — we have an 
extraordinary testimony to its power. As long as this 
mental attitude prevails we cannot get our question fairly 
considered. Men's temperaments may vary, and with 
them the spirit in which they address themselves to the 
study of the gospels. One man's treatment may be poetic, 
or possibly sentimental; the gospels for him are the finest 
flowering of the Christian imagination; of course they 
cannot be taken for truth, but they must always be deli- 
cately and even reverently handled. Another is mock- 
ing and unsympathetic; another still dispassionate, 
not to say unfeeling. But the result is always the same. 
Jesus remains out of our reach. The figure which we 
see in the gospels is the Christ of the Church's faith, not 
a historical person. That figure did not create the 
Church, it was created by it. As we have them, the gos- 
pels are not the foundation of the Christian religion, 
they are its fruit. They show us the Christian conscious- 
ness, not the consciousness of Christ. 

Those who thus remind us that the gospels are not 
historical but religious books — that their motive is not to 
provide materials for the scientific biographer or his- 
torian, but to evoke and to build up faith — might perhaps 
^ Ihid., 47. 



THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 147 

ask themselves whether the contrast which is here im- 
pHed is as real or as complete as they suppose. It is 
quite true that it is one thing to tell a story, and another 
to make out a case; but if a man has a sound case, the 
simplest way to make it out is to tell his story. It is 
surely conceivable that his case may be constituted by 
the facts. It is only if he has a bad case that he is under 
any temptation to misrepresent, or colour, or suppress, 
or produce facts. The attitude to the gospel narratives 
which has just been described, and of which Strauss's 
mythical theory is the most consistent and far-shining 
example, is prescribed beforehand by the assumption 
that the evangelists have a bad case. Jesus, it is assumed, 
cannot really have that place in the relations of God 
and man which the primitive Church assigned Him, 
and therefore everything in the gospels which is con- 
gruous with that place, which conditions it or is conditioned 
by it, must have some other explanation than that it is true. 
But this assumption forecloses the question, and is one 
which we are not entitled to make. Why should not the 
evangelists, or the primitive Church for which they wrote, 
have had a good case ? Why must it have been something 
else than reality which made them give to Jesus the place 
they did? And if it is conceivable — as surely it is — that 
the New Testament attitude to Jesus is right, it is as con- 
ceivable that the attitude we have been considering to the 
narratives of His life is wrong. In spite of protestations 
made in the name of 'scientific' history, the possibilities 
of history are not to be dogmatically determined beforehand. 
If we could have such a thing as Christianity on the 
basis here exhibited, it would manifestly be Christianity 
without Jesus. It would be a religion which in some way 
was connected with Him when it made its entrance into 
history; but the connexion would be partly undiscover- 
able, and so far as it was discovered it would be illegiti- 



148 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

mate. This position is frankly avowed, for example, by 
Wellhausen. He distinguishes in the broadest manner 
between Jesus and the gospel — that is, between Jesus and 
the Christian religion as it has existed from the beginning; 
- and he is not only certain that the attempt to get back to the 
historical Jesus is one which must always be frustrated, but 
one which, even if it were successful, could only lead to 
disappointment. The historical Jesus, could we come face 
to face with Him, would not sustain the Christian con- 
ception of the Christ; He would not provide a justifica- 
tion for the religion which has attached itself to His 
name. The true policy of the Church, therefore, is to 
stick to the gospel, and not to try to return to Jesus.* 
Those who retain any connexion with historical Chris- 
tianity find it hard to comprehend this state of mind. 
They can draw no such distinction between Jesus and 
the gospel. They know that if they eliminated Jesus 
from what they call the gospel they would eliminate 
everything. Their religion rests on historical realities 
which are inseparable from the person of Jesus, or it 
ceases to be. It would not follow, though it ceased to be, 
that they could have no religion whatever. They might 
still be believers in God as men were in Old Testament 
times, but they could not be believers in God ' through 
Him' (i Peter i ^^). Their religion would have no title 
to be called Christian, no claim to the character of gospel. 
It is impossible, therefore, to suppose that the members of 
any Christian Church can find relief from the stress of in- 
tellectual difficulty by distinguishing between the gospel 
and Jesus. This is not relief, but ruin; it is not the 
rescuing of their religion, but the abandonment, not to 
say the renunciation of it. The assumption which under- 
lies it has been frankly stated by a writer already referred 
to: 'Jesus was nothing more than a human being like 

^ Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, io8 ff. 



THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 149 

the rest of us.' ^ Of course if this can be assumed there 
is no more to be said. The place which Jesus has always 
held in Christian faith is one which is not open to the rest 
of us, never has been and never can be; and if He is no 
more than the rest of us, it should never have been open 
to Him. Nevertheless, the connexion between Jesus and 
the Christian religion remains; and unless we are content 
to leave it entirely in the dark, we shall find ourselves com- 
pelled to raise the ulterior question which by this assump- 
tion is foreclosed. Granting that the figure in the gospels 
is the product of the Church's faith, by what was that 
faith itself produced? The New Testament taken as a 
whole represents the most astonishing outburst of intel- 
lectual and spiritual energy in the history of our race: 
by what was it evoked ? Surely the probabilities are that 
some extraordinary reality — something quite unlike the 
rest of us — ^lies behind and explains all this: a reality so 
powerful and impressive that it could not easily be lost 
within the limits of a generation, either by simply falling 
out of memory, or by being so transfigured and exalted 
in imagination as to preserve almost no trace of its orig- 
inal aspect or proportions. It is with this prejudice, 
rather than with the opposite one, that we think it rea- 
sonable to approach the investigation of a question which 
can never be less than vital to those who have been edu- 
cated in Christian faith. 

Before proceeding, however, to examination of the facts, 
it is desirable to refer to two prevalent but somewhat 
summary ways in which an attempt has been made to get 
into contact with the reality which lies beneath the gospel 
narratives, without entering into any scrutiny in detail. 

^ J. Weiss, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments^ i. 67. The very words 
ought to be quoted. ' Gerade dass Jesus nichts weiter war als ein Men- 
schenkind wie wir andern auch, &c.' Weiss asserts in the same sentence 
the greatness and power of the personality of Jesus and his own rever- 
ence for it. 



I50 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

The one, while there is nothing in it inconsistent with 
history, is mainly inspired by a religious interest. When 
a man who is morally in earnest, absorbed in the effort to 
lead a spiritual life in the world of nature, a life of freedom 
in the realm of necessity, takes the gospels into his hand 
and looks upon the figure of Jesus, the last thing which 
will occur to him is that this figure is unreal. There 
may be a great deal in the gospel narratives which puz- 
zles him, which he does not know what to do with, and 
for the present must ignore; but there is something also 
which is its own evidence and which rises out of the nar- 
rative in unquestionable reality — the spiritual life of Jesus. 
There is a person before his eyes in the gospel whose 
spiritual reality (to express it thus) is so indisputable that 
it carries his historical reality along with it. A life of such 
perfect trust in God, such wonderful love to God and man 
— a life that by its very mass attracts to itself so irresist- 
ibly all feeble lives that have the faintest affinity with it 
or capacity for it — a life that gathers into its own deep 
and powerful stream all souls in search of God and bears 
them on to the salvation they seek: what could be idler 
than to speak of such a life as unhistorical or unreal? 
Those who come to the gospels thus can only feel that the 
life of Jesus, even in the historical sense, is the most real 
thing in the world; and so far from admitting that Jesus 
is practically unknown to us, they are certain that they 
know Him better than any one who has ever lived, better 
even than themselves. They are quite willing to leave 
to historical criticism the investigation of incident and 
detail; their conviction is not dependent on what is thought 
of any isolated word or act ascribed to Jesus in the gospels; 
but the reality, and it must be added the historical reality, 
of the spiritual life of Jesus is established for them on 
grounds which historical criticism must acknowledge, and 
which it cannot set aside. 



THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 151 

This is a way of approaching the gospels, and of get- 
ting into contact with the reality attested in them, of which 
we are bound to speak with the utmost respect. It is a 
truly religious way of approaching them, and must largely 
reproduce in the soul the experiences of the first dis- 
ciples of Jesus. But the more completely Jesus, through 
the picture of His life in the gospels, establishes His as- 
cendency over souls seeking God and freedom, the more 
inevitably will those questions arise which deal with His 
place in the relations of the soul and God. How is it 
that such an ascendency comes to be His? How does it 
come to be His alone? When we say, 'Yes, this life is 
real; it is the life of one whom we experience through it 
and in virtue of it to be Saviour and Lord,' what do we 
mean? Who is He? Is there any indication, in words 
ascribed to Him, of a consciousness on His own part 
answering to or agreeing with these experiences of ours? 
Such questions cannot fail to arise and to press for an 
answer, and it is in investigating the gospels to find mate- 
rial for the answer, rather than in dwelling upon the general 
assurance of the reality of the inner life of Jesus, that any 
contribution is likely to be made to the subject with which 
we are concerned. It is too easily taken for granted by 
many who study the genesis of faith in the modern man 
that he will rest content with the immediate impression 
made by Jesus in the gospels, and that ulterior questions 
need not be asked. There are even those who think that 
it does not matter how the ulterior questions are answered; 
the impressions are their own evidence and will remain 
what they are, though the questions they naturally prompt 
should by some never be raised, and by others pronounced 
insoluble. But this is not so certain. Capable as the 
human mind is of inconsistency, it does not readily dis- 
own the responsibility of explaining and justifying its 
convictions. What if Jesus Himself, in the special case 



152 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

with which we are engaged, pressed this responsibility 
upon it? What if He directly prompted the ulterior 
questions? It may turn out to be the case that in His 
whole bearing toward men and God He assumes one way 
of answering them to be adequate, and others not; the 
extraordinary influence which in the pages of the gospels 
He wields over others may be merely the reflection of an 
extraordinary consciousness on His part of the place He 
fills in all the relations of God and human souls. If upon 
examination this should prove to be so, then, valuable as 
it is as a starting-point, that conviction of the historical 
reality of Jesus which confines itself to the self-evidencing 
reality of His spiritual life — a life assumed to be assimil- 
able, to the last fibre, by us — is not all we have to take 
into account. While it assures us that Jesus was truly 
a historical person, and a historical person who was a 
great conductor of spiritual force, it does not face with 
sufficient definiteness the question whether there was 
in this historical person, not that which makes a spiritual 
movement of some kind credible, but that which justifies 
the particular spiritual movement which appeals to Him 
as its Author. When we speak of the spiritual or inner 
life of Jesus — an expression which we instinctively inter- 
pret by those experiences in ourselves which we should 
describe by the same name — there is an involuntary 
tendency to obliterate or ignore any difference which 
may exist between Jesus and those to whom His spiritual 
life appeals. Without consciously thinking of it, we 
regard Him for the time as if He were only what the 
rest of us are. But this amounts to deciding, also with- 
out thinking, the greatest question which the gospels 
and the Christian religion raise. The self-consciousness 
of Jesus is not a happy expression, but it is preferable to 
the inner life of Jesus in one way: it safeguards more 
effectively the objectivity and personal peculiarity of 



THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 153 

that which it denotes. It leaves room for the possibility 
that in the mind of Jesus about Himself there may be 
not only the consciousness that He is one with us, but 
such a consciousness as justifies the transcendent place 
apart given to Him in the faith of the Church. Hence 
it is the mind of Christ about Himself — His self -conscious- 
ness in the technical sense — and not His inner life or spir- 
itual experiences in general, which must be our principal 
subject of inquiry; and to investigate this subject satis- 
factorily we must go beyond the vague impressions in 
which the life of Jesus first proves its reality to us, and 
study the gospel evidence in detail. 

The second of the two summary ways of gettmg mto 
contact with the reality in the gospels is the polar opposite 
of the one just discussed. It is that which is illustrated 
in the well-known article of Schmiedel in the Encyclo- 
pcedia Biblica. 'When a profane historian,' says Schmie- 
del, 'finds before him a historical document which tes- 
tifies to the worship of a hero unknown to other sources, 
he attaches first and foremost importance to those fea- 
tures which cannot be deduced merely from the fact of 
this worship, and he does so on the simple and sufficient 
ground that they would not be found in this source unless 
the author had met with them as fixed data of tradition. 
The same fundamental principle may safely be applied 
in the case of the gospels, for they also are all of them 
written by worshippers of Jesus.' * We only put this 
more simply when we say that anything in the gospels may 
be regarded as signally true if it is inconsistent with the 
worship of Jesus. If we could not find such things at all, 
Schmiedel holds 'it would be impossible to prove to a 
sceptic that any historical value whatever was to be as- 
signed to the gospels; he would be in a position to de- 
clare the picture of Jesus contained in them to be purely 

1 Encyclopcedia Biblica, 1872 ff. 



154 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

a work of phantasy, and could remove the person of 
Jesus from the field of history.' If we accepted this 
canon of criticism, it might be reassuring to us as histo- 
rians to find that there are passages in the gospels which 
no worshipper of Jesus could have invented, passages, 
consequently, which were data to the evangelists, and 
which we are safe in counting historical. Of these the 
article referred to mentions five, which along with four 
others, all the latter being connected with the miracles and 
employed to discredit them, * might be called the founda- 
tion pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus.' The five 
passages in question are worth repeating. They are 
— (i) Mark lo^^: Why callest thou Me good? None 
is good save God only. (2) Mark 3 ^^ : He is beside 
Himself. (3) Matt. 12 ^^: Whoso speaketh a word against 
the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him. (4) Mark 13 ^^: 
Of that day and of that hour knoweth no one, not even 
the angels in heaven, neither the Son but the Father. 
And (5) Mark 15 ^*: My God, My God, why hast Thou 
forsaken Me? It is a curious comment on the things 
most surely believed among profane historians, that of 
these foundation pillars the third and fifth have since 
been found by some decidedly shaky. This, however, 
does not matter to us at present. What does matter 
is that Jesus is only admitted to be real in a sense which, 
avowedly, leaves the whole phenomenon of New Testa- 
ment religion not only unjustified but inexplicable. 
We have no testimony to Jesus at all, as Schmiedel points 
out, except that of men who worshipped Him ; but though 
some of that testimony, as will be afterwards shown, 
comes from intimates and contemporaries, the only part 
of it which we can receive as true is that which is inconsis- 
tent with such worship. The idea that there should be 
reality in Jesus of such a kind as to justify worship is 
summarily excluded ab initio: its exclusion, indeed, is 



THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 155 

the first principle of this criticism. It is one way of 
criticising this to point out that it takes for granted that 
the worship of Jesus is wrong, that the Christian attitude 
to Him is unjustifiable, and that the Christian religion 
was from the beginning a mistake ; it is another, and not a 
less relevant one, to point out that it leaves the Christian 
religion, in the only form in which it is known to history, 
without any historical explanation. It is impossible 
to rest seriously in such a situation, and it is as impossible 
to suppose seriously that we have got out of it when 
Schmiedel tells us that 'the thoroughly disinterested his- 
torian, recognising it to be his duty to investigate the 
grounds for this so great reverence for Himself which 
Jesus was able to call forth, will then first and foremost 
find himself led to recognise as true the two great facts 
that Jesus had compassion for the multitudes and that he 
preached with power, not as the scribes.' The impor- 
tance of these two great facts is not to be disputed, but 
few will find in them the whole explanation of the New 
Testament attitude to Jesus. There must be a more 
intelligible proportion than we can discover here between 
the cause and the effect; and while it may relieve some 
anxious minds to know that the most rigorous scepticism 
is obliged to admit the existence of Jesus, inquirers with an 
eye on all the facts to be explained may find that a more 
searching investigation brings them into contact with a still 
greater reality in Jesus than this paradoxically sceptical 
criticism has discovered. We cannot admit beforehand, 
nor can we allow others to assume, that there is a complete 
breach of continuity between the Jesus who can be dis- 
covered in history and the Christ who has had from the 
first the transcendent place, with which we are familiar, 
in Christian faith; whether there is or is not a true con- 
tinuity between them, such a continuity that the historical 
Jesus justifies the attitude of believers to their Lord and 



156 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

Saviour, is a question which has to be tested by examina- 
tion of the evidence in our hands. That evidence is con- 
tained in the gospels, and it is to an examination of these 
documents we now proceed. 

For reasons on which it is needl\5ss to enlarge, our 
attention will be confined to the synoptic gospels — 
Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It is so difficult in the gos- 
pel according to John to distinguish between the mind 
of the writer and that of the subject — ^between the seed 
of the word and that to which it grows in the soul — be- 
tween what John heard in Galilee or the upper room 
and what the Lord by the Spirit said in His heart in 
later days — that it could only be used inconclusively 
in the present discussion. Even the first three gospels 
cannot be used without reflection; and though this is not 
the place to make any contribution, were one capable of 
it, to the solution of the synoptic problem, it is necessary 
to indicate the position from which one writes, and to 
justify it so far as the case requires. 

The criticism of the gospels, literary and historical, 
has now gone on for more than a hundred and fifty years, 
and, much as remains and perhaps must ever remain 
uncertain, there are one or two important conclusions 
on which experts are agreed. To begin with, it is agreed 
that the gospels of Matthew and Luke are based upon 
Mark. 

With a very few slight omissions, the whole of Mark 
is embodied in the other evangelists. He has provided 
for them the framework of their narrative, and it is in- 
deed the strongest proof of his priority that while Matthew 
and Luke frequently diverge from each other in respect to 
the order of events in the life of Jesus, they never agree 
against Mark in such divergences. In other words, 
where divergence in the order of incidents occurs, either 
Matthew supports Mark against Luke, or Luke sup- 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 157 

ports him against Matthew: a clear proof that his is 
the original order underlying both, and that no authority 
common to both can be pleaded against it. 

The priority of Mark to the other gospels being es- 
tablished, it becomes a question of importance who 
Mark was, and what was his relation to the events which, 
as far as we know, first obtained from his hand that 
literary representation through which we are familiar 
with them. Mark, the author of the gospel, was assumed 
till yesterday to be identical with the John Mark of the 
book of Acts (12 ^2) and the Mark mentioned by Peter 
(ist Epist. 5 13) and Paul (Col. 4 ^^ Philemon 2^, 2 Tim, 
4"), and in spite of recent suspicions * there is no sohd 
ground for questioning this view. A very ancient tra- 
dition, quoted by Eusebius from Papias, who was bishop 
of Hierapolis before the middle of the second century, 
is all the external help we have to define more precisely 
the relation of Mark to the facts with which he deals. It 
runs as follows:^ 'And the Elder said this also: Mark, 
having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down 
accurately everything that he remembered, without, 
however, recording in order what was either said or done 
by Christ. For neither did he hear the Lord, nor did he 
follow Him; but afterwards, as I said, [attended] Peter, 
who adapted his instructions to the needs [of his hearers], 
but had no design of giving a connected account of the 
Lord's oracles. So then Mark made no mistake, while he 
thus wrote down some things as he remembered them; 
for he made it his one care not to omit anything that he 
had heard, or to set down any false statement therein? Such 
then is the account given by Papias concerning Mark.' 
This brief statement has been put upon the rack a thou- 

* See J. Weiss, Das dlteste Evangelium, 385 ff. 

2 See Eusebius, Hist. EccL, iii. 39. The translation is taken from 
Professor Gwatkin's Selections from Early Christian Writers, p. 43 ff. 



158 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

sand times, though to an unsuspicious mind it seems fairly 
unambiguous. The presbyter, to whom Papias refers as 
his authority, had been himself an immediate disciple of 
Jesus, and Papias was personally acquainted with him.^ 
It is hardly conceivable that he should have mistaken 
what this early disciple used to say (Heyev) about the 
gospel; although he is disparaged by Eusebius, for 
theological reasons, as a person of very mean intelligence, 
Papias was quite capable of recording a fact. What is 
required in a witness is not largeness of mind, but fidelity. 
The one important fact in the testimony of the presbyter 
who had kept company with Jesus is this, that the gospel 
according to Mark is the work of a man who was the com- 
panion and interpreter of Peter. Indirectly, if not im- 
mediately, it has the authority of an apostle behind it. ^ 

» Euseb. Hist. EccL, iii. 39, 7. 'And Papias, of whom we are now 
speaking, confesses that he received the words of the apostles from those 
that followed them, but says that he was himself a hearer of Aristion and 
the presbyter John.' The much-discussed question whether this John 
whom Papias had heard is or is not one with John the son of Zebedee, 
the apostle to whom the fourth gospel is ascribed, is not of vital conse- 
quence here; he was in any case a 'disciple of the Lord,' which cannot 
mean simply a Christian, but only one who had been in contact with 
Jesus. Papias does not give John's opinion from a book; but in his own 
book, quoted by Eusebius, he reports the account the presbyter used to 
give about the gospel of Mark. For opposite views about John and his 
importance here v. Zahn, Forschungen zur Geschichte des neut. Kanons, 
vi. 109 ff.; Harnack, Chronologic der altchr. Litteratur, 660 ff. Harnack's 
attempt to minimise the significance of the phrase 'the disciples of the 
Lord,' applied to Aristion and John, is rather ingenious than convincing. 
When he remarks that juaOr^rai was ganz wesentlich au} Paldstina {fiir die 
Gesammtheit) beschrankt, he seems to overlook the fact that in Acts it is 
freely used of Christians everywhere, and that outside of Acts and the gos- 
pels it does not occur in the New Testament at all. 

2 Harnack, Chronologie, i. 686 f., after quoting the passage from Clem. 
Alex, preserved in Eusebius, H. E., vi. 14, and ending with the words (re- 
ferring to Mark's composition of the gospel at the request of Peter's 
hearers in Rome) oTrsp eiTiyvdvTa rbv Tihpov irporpeTTTiKcliq jxrjTe KuXvoai fiTjre 
TTpoTpitpaodac,, adds: 'Das heisst doch mit diirren Worten: Dieses Evan- 
gelium hat keine petrinische Autoritat; Petrus ist fiir dasselbe nicht 
verantwortlich ; es steht ledigHch auf sich selber.' This is only true be- 
cause it is ambiguous. The book did not bear Peter's imprimatur; he 
issued no certificate with it to secure it a legitimate place in the Church. 
But though it was sent out on its own merits it had Peter's preaching 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 159 

If we turn from this tradition to the gospel itself we 
find significant features in the narrative by which it is 
confirmed. Detail begins in Mark with the hour at 
which Peter and Andrew are called and enter into more 
or less constant attendance upon Jesus (ch. i ^®^-). The 
one full Sabbath day which is narrated in the gospel 
centres round Simon's house (i ^^ ^-). When the next 
morning early Jesus, v\^ho had retired into a desert place 
to pray, was 'hunted down,' it was by 'Simon and they 
that were with him'; we can imagine how Peter in tell- 
ing the story simply said 'we.' When Jesus appoints 
the Twelve, we are told how He gave Simon the sur- 
name Peter, though no explanation of the new name is 
given. At a later stage — at what, indeed, it was once 
customary to regard as the crisis and the turning-point 
in the career of Jesus — it is Peter who confesses Jesus 
to be the Christ; and in close connexion with the first 
prediction of the Passion, which is the immediate sequel, 
it is Peter who remonstrates with Jesus, and draws down 
upon himself a severe rebuke (8 ^^ ^•) . It is Peter again 
who, when the rich ruler refuses to sell all that he has, 
as a preliminary to following Jesus, reminds the Master 
that He and His companions have done what had proved 
too hard for this promising recruit, and tacitly at least 
inquires what reward they shall have. In the closing 
scenes of the gospel he is still more conspicuous. He is 
one of the little party to whom the prophetic discourse 
of Jesus is addressed on the Mount of Olives (13 ^ ^■) ; 
we are told in vivid terms how he boasted of his devotion 
to Jesus, how he was reproached in the garden that he 
could not watch with his Master one hour, how in spite 

behind it; and the writer's qualification, according to the very passage 
on which Harnack bases these strong assertions, was his long and familiar 
acquaintance with this preaching (uadv aKoXovdrjaavra avrC) iroppcoOev koI 
fiefivTjfievov ruv Xexdsvruv). It is in this sense it is said to have, and does 
have, Peter's authority. 



i6o JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

of repeated warnings he denied Him with oaths and 
curses; we are told also of his swift and deep repentance 
(14 ^' ^•). Finally (in ch. 16 ^) there is the message of the 
angels to the women at the tomb: Go tell His disciples 
and Peter that He goeth before you into Galilee — a 
message which, as has been already observed, justifies 
the inference that this gospel originally closed with an 
appearance of Jesus to the eleven, but either added to 
that or combined with it an appearing, to some special 
intent, to Peter. It is quite true that all these things 
about Peter might have been known and told by some 
other than himself. When, however, we notice the 
peculiar character of the events which make up the first 
exciting day; when we consider that incidents in the 
life of Jesus are depicted only from the calling of Peter 
onward; when we review, especially, the circumstantial 
and vivid narrative of the closing chapters in which the 
apostle plays so mournful a part, it is impossible to come to 
any other conclusion than that the tradition preserved by 
Papias is confirmed. That tradition is not of the nature 
of a learned deduction; it is given as a piece of informa- 
tion by one who was in a position to know what he was 
speaking about, but it is supported by an examination 
of the gospel itself. It is quite safe to assume, then, 
that in some real sense the preaching of Peter underlies 
the gospel of Mark. The date at which the gospel was 
composed cannot be precisely determined, but there is 
a growing preponderance of opinion which puts it in the 
sixties of the Christian era, before, though not long be- 
fore, the destruction of Jerusalem. ^ 

This early date and apostolic connexion are not to be 
underrated. We cannot indeed presume upon them so 

^ Harnack puts it, as a probability, between 65 and 70: Die Chronolo- 
gie der altchristlichen Litteratur, i. 718; J. Weiss between 64 and 66: 
Die Schrijten des Neuen Testaments, i. 61. 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK i6i 

far as to say that we have the testimony of an eye-witness 
for everything recorded in Mark, but they have, un- 
doubtedly, historical importance. They prove that in 
the life and experience of one man at least there was no 
radical inconsistency, no breach of continuity, between 
an actual acquaintance with Jesus as He lived on earth 
and the Christian attitude to Jesus as the object of faith. 
The idea of much modern criticism of the gospels is that 
'Jesus' can be pleaded against 'the Christ,' 'history' 
invoked to discredit 'faith'; but the primary fact which 
we have to go upon is that the very man who stood closest 
to the historical Jesus appealed to the historical knowl- 
edge of Him to vindicate and evoke faith. It is quite 
possible that at one point or another there may be sec- 
ondary elements in the representation of Jesus by Mark. 
It is quite possible that at one point or another the Chris- 
tian teaching with which the evangelist was familiar 
may have left traces on his language which are sug- 
gestive rather of the period at which he wrote than of that 
concerning which he writes. Instances of either must be 
judged upon their merits. When we consider, however, 
that the gospel of Mark was composed within thirty or 
forty years of the death of Jesus, that the subject with 
which it deals had been the matter of incessant and public 
teaching throughout this period, and that the narrative 
rests, as we have seen, at its beginning, its crisis, and its 
close, upon the authority of an immediate and intimate 
disciple, we shall probably be disposed to infer that the 
presumptions are strongly in favour of its historical 
character. Certainly we shall not feel at liberty to pro- 
nounce anything unhistorical merely because it helps to 
make Christianity intelligible, or to evince the continuity 
between the historical life of Jesus and the life of the 
Christian Church. 
There are cruder and subtler ways in which this has 
II 



i62 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

already been done. A scholar who admits the evidence 
which connects the second gospel with the preaching of 
Peter proceeds to distinguish in the narrative what can 
and what cannot claim to be covered by this apostolic 
testimony. His criterion is the very simple one that 
everything supernatural — perhaps one should say every- 
thing too supernatural — must be excluded. As such 
things cannot possibly have taken place, they cannot 
possibly rest on the word of an eye-witness. This short 
and easy method of dealing with certain elements in the 
gospel story is applied with cheerful confidence, for ex- 
ample, by Von Soden. * It was more plausible to argue 
thus when the gospels were dated in the second century, 
and legends had had time and space to grow; it is not 
so easy to believe that the faith of Christians — for it is 
always faith which is the parent of the marvellous — could 
deform or transfigure the story of Jesus in the lifetime of 
those who were familiar with Him, under their very eyes, 
while they were engaged in bearing their own testimony 
to Him, and had, so far as we have any means of judging, 
a lively sense of the importance of its historical truth 
(Acts I ^^ ^•, I John I ^). But it is not necessary to enter 
into this subject here, for what is ruled out by Von Soden 
as too supernatural has hardly an immediate bearing on 
the question in which we are interested. Far more im- 
portant in its issues, and far subtler in itself, is the criti- 
cism of Wellhausen. There is a section in the book — 
that which extends from chap. 8 ^^ to chap. lo ^^ — which, 
to put his opinion bluntly, is Christian, and therefore not 
historical. The framework of time and space is the same 
as in the earlier chapters, but there is a deep inward dis- 
tinction. 'Here,' as it is put by Wellhausen, whose 
language is reproduced in what follows,^ ' begins the 

1 Die wichtigsten Fragen im Leben Jesu, 29 ff. 

2 Das Evangelium Marci, 65 f . Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelienj 
81, f., 113. 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 163 

gospel in the proper sense of the term, the gospel as the 
apostles preached it; till now there has been little trace 
of it. The resolve to go to Jerusalem, which does not 
seem to be occasioned by the Passover, produces a sur- 
prising change. A transfigured Jesus stands before us, 
and the two healing miracles which are still interspersed 
are positively incongruous. Jesus no longer teaches uni- 
versal truth. He prophesies regarding His own person. 
He no longer addresses the people, but a limited circle 
of His disciples. He discloses to them His nature and 
His destiny. He does this, too, in a purely esoteric 
fashion; they must not tell any one till after His prophecy 
regarding Himself has been fulfilled; nay, until then they 
do not understand it themselves. The occasion of re- 
nouncing His former reserve with them was provided by 
Peter's confession, Thou art the Messiah. He Himself 
evoked and accepted this confession, yet in the same 
instant He corrected it: He is not the Messiah who is 
to restore the Kingdom of Israel, but quite another. It 
is not to set up the Kingdom that He goes to Jerusalem, 
but to be crucified. Through suffering and death He 
enters into the Messianic glory, and only in this way can 
others enter. The Kingdom of God is no Jewish King- 
dom, it is destined only for certain elect individuals, the 
disciples. The idea that /xeravota, repentance, is still 
possible for the nation is completely abandoned. Instead 
of a caU to repent, addressed to all, comes the summons 
to follow, which can only be fulfilled by a few. The con- 
ception of following now loses its literal meaning and 
assumes a higher one. What is involved is no longer as 
hitherto attendance on Jesus in His lifetime, going with 
Him where He goes; the main thing is to follow Him to 
death. As imitatio Jesu, following is possible even after 
He dies, or rather it first becomes possible then in the 
strict sense. The Cross is to be borne after Him. The 



i64 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

disciples must for the Kingdom's sake break completely 
with national and domestic ties; they must sacrifice 
everything that binds them to life, and even life itself. 
Reform is impossible: the hostility of the world can 
never be overcome. The breach with the world is de- 
manded which leads to martyrdom. The situation and 
the mood of the primitive Church are here reflected 
beforehand by Jesus as He goes to meet His fate. On 
this depends the profound pathos in which the introduc- 
tion to the story of the Passion surpasses the latter itself.* 
The facts which are here summarised have long been 
familiar: what is open to question is the explanation and 
the historical estimate of them. According to Well- 
hausen, this section of Mark, which contains or pre- 
supposes the Christian gospel, is for that very reason not 
historical at all. It is not conceived in the mind or in 
the historical situation of Jesus: what is reflected in it is 
the position and mood of the primitive martyr Church. 
Jesus, as Wellhausen puts it elsewhere, here transports 
Himself nor merely into His own future, but into the 
future of His Church, whose foundation was His death 
and resurrection: and this, it is assumed, we cannot 
suppose Him to have done. On this we should remark, 
in the first place, that there is something essentially false 
in the contrast assumed to exist between the mind and 
historical situation of Jesus, and the position and mood 
of the primitive martyr Church. Jesus was Himself a 
martyr, and the situation in which He found Himself, in 
the last weeks and months of His life, was to all intents 
and purposes that in which the primitive Church found 
itself after His death. That the disciples did not under- 
stand what He taught them about His death is no doubt 
true, but we cannot infer from this that it is a mistake on 
the part of the evangelist to represent Him, in the cir- 
cumstances of that time, as teaching anything about His 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 165 

death at all. The disciples' difficulty in understanding 
had nothing to do with the historical situation. Quite 
apart from that situation and its circumstances, the idea 
that the destined Christ should die a violent death at the 
hands of men was so disconcerting as to be incredible to 
the Twelve. It required the event and its sequel — the 
Resurrection — to open and reconcile their minds to it. 
For Jews in general it remained as incredible and unin- 
telligible in the days of the martyr Church as it had been 
for His followers while Jesus was yet with them. It does 
not follow, because words ascribed to Jesus have an 
application for disciples after His death, that these words 
were invented then and only put into His lips by antici- 
pation.^ Jesus could anticipate. Indeed we may say 
that like every one who thinks of leaving the world and 
of leaving behind in it those who are dear to him, He 
could not but anticipate. He transported Himself in- 
stinctively into the future and addressed Himself to it. 
When we come to examine the texts in detail, we shall 
see whether or how far there is anything in them which 
may be pronounced impossible in His historical situation. 
Further, it must be observed that the critical change 
in the teaching of Jesus, which sets in at ch. 8^^ has 
much to support it. It is not inconceivable, but inher- 
ently credible and likely, that such a change should have 
come with the crisis in the ministry of Jesus with which 
Mark connects it — a crisis in which the antagonism of 
His own people had driven Him beyond their borders, 
and led Him to concentrate His efforts on the training 
of the Twelve. That there is such a crisis intended in 
the narrative the writer must still believe, in spite of 
recent attempts to disintegrate the gospel and deprive 
the sequences in it of all significance. It takes a great 
deal of courage to question the historicity of the first 

> See an admirable page in Harnack, Sprilche und Reden Jesu, 143. 



i66 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

scenes in this 'Christian' section — that in which Peter 
confesses Jesus to be the Christ, an incident enshrined 
in every form of the evangelic tradition; and that in 
which Jesus rebukes Peter as the Satan for protesting 
against the idea that the Christ should suffer. But if 
these scenes are admittedly historical, it is hard to see on 
what ground anything that comes after is questioned. 
Nothing that comes after is more unequivocally * Chris- 
tian.' To believe in Jesus as the Messiah who through 
death enters into glory — to believe in Him and to follow 
Him on the path of suffering and martyrdom — this is 
indeed Christian; but it is a conception of Christianity 
which there is no need whatever to remove from the life 
of the historical Jesus. The mere fact that it was intelli- 
gible, relevant, applicable, after He died and rose again, 
does not prove that it was not as intelligible, relevant, 
and applicable, while He lived. 

It must be added that there is a question-begging 
exaggeration in Wellhausen's list of the ' so to speak tech- 
nical ideas and words' which are characteristic of this 
section, and set it in relief against the gospel as a whole: 
'the Son of Man, the gospel, the name of Jesus, this world 
and the world to come, the Kingdom of God, the S6^a^ 
life, salvation, following in the higher sense, minis- 
try, the fjLtxpo). 7:cffTeoovT£<;^ the ffxavdaXa,^ ^ Several of 
these, as a glance at the Concordance will show, occur 
earlier in the gospel; most of them can be paralleled 
from an evangelic document which is independent of 
Mark;^ and not one of them is technical except in the 
sense in which any word becomes technical when it is 
applied in new conditions. But the conditions in which 
these words are applied in the gospels, as will become 
evident when we examine them in detail — or such of 

* Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 8i. 

' See Harnack's list of the substantives in Q, Spriiche u. Reden Jesu^ 
io8ff. 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF MARK 167 

them as throw light on our problem — are conditions in 
which they may quite well have been applied by Jesus 
Himself; on any other hypothesis, indeed, the mind and 
the language of Christianity present insoluble difficulties. 
It is no doubt the case that in this section of Mark it is 
conspicuously impossible to see in Jesus nur ein Menschen- 
kindf wie wir andern auch, but it is impossible to accept 
this personal prejudice as a principle of criticism. Well- 
hausen only puts it in a new form when with a view to 
discrediting this * Christian' part of the gospel he tells us 
that Jesus was not a Christian but a Jew, and not a Jew 
who taught a new faith, but only a new and better way 
of doing the will of God, which for him as for all his 
countrymen was revealed in the Old Testament. No 
doubt He was a Jew, but He was a Jew to whom the 
Christian religion in some way owes its origin; and it is 
not a prima facie reason for scepticism when we find in 
the record of His life hints or suggestions of what was 
unquestionably its outcome. To apply this to the dis- 
ciple whose authority, we have seen reason to believe, 
lies behind the narrative: if there was, as there must 
have been, a continuity of some sort between Peter's ex- 
periences with Jesus in His lifetime and his relation to 
Him after death — if the Christian attitude to the Lord 
is not to appear as something entirely irrational and 
groundless, but as something with true antecedents in 
the relation of His followers to Jesus — the presumption is 
that the * Christian' section of Mark is as historical as 
the rest. But possibly the one consideration which in- 
fluences criticism here most decisively is the attitude of 
the critic himself to the resurrection. If Jesus did not 
rise from the dead at all, it relieves Him from the re- 
proach of self-delusion if we assume that He did not 
anticipate or predict His rising, as in these chapters He 
repeatedly does. But if He did rise again on the third 



i68 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

day — if His future really included that unparalleled ex- 
perience — it is by no means inconceivable that a person 
with a destiny so extraordinary should have contemplated 
and spoken of it. If the certainties with which we start 
are that Jesus was only a human being, exactly like the 
rest of us, and that He had no resurrection on the third 
day, but only came to life again in the hearts of His 
followers, then Mark 8 ^^ to lo ^ must seem radically 
untrue. But so must a great deal more in the life of 
Jesus — so must everything, in short, which connects that 
life with Christian faith. But these certainties are as- 
sumed, not proved, and we can approach with unpreju- 
diced minds this as all the other parts of the gospel. It 
is not doing anything but justice to the whole of the facts 
involved if we say that we ought to have a bias in favour 
of what connects Christianity with Jesus, rather than in 
favour of ideas which fix a great gulf between them. 

The priority of Mark to Matthew and Luke, its relation 
to Peter, and its date in the sixties, are the first important 
conclusion of gospel criticism. There is a second which 
is perhaps even of higher interest. A comparison of 
Matthew and Luke shows not only that each of them 
has embodied practically the whole of Mark, but that 
each of them has also in common with the other a large 
quantity of matter which is not found in Mark. This 
matter consists in the main of words of Jesus, and it is 
pretty generally agreed that besides Mark, which sup- 
plied them with the narrative outline which they fol- 
low, Matthew and Luke used a second source which 
supplied them with reports of Jesus' teaching. Many 
attempts have been made to reconstruct this document, 
but naturally with precarious results.^ It is easy to take 
the first step, and to refer to it all the matter which is 

1 For the two latest, v. Harnack's Sprilche und Reden Jesu; B. Weiss, 
Die QtieUen der synoptischen Ueberlieferung. 



THE SECOND PRIMITIVE SOURCE— Q 169 

common to Matthew and Luke, but wanting to Mark. 
But this does not take us far. It is quite possible that 
one of the evangelists may have made extracts from it 
which the other ignored. For example, it contained an 
account of the ministry of the Baptist from which both 
certainly borrowed. But what of the differences between 
Matthew and Luke at this point? Matthew alone tells 
us of a reluctance on John's part to baptize Jesus (Matt. 
3 "^•): was this found in the source common to him 
and Luke, but passed over by the latter? Luke alone 
gives a report of John's teaching to the multitudes, to 
publicans, and to soldiers (3 ^^'^*) : was this found in 
the common source, and similarly passed over by Mat- 
thew? We cannot tell. The document which both 
our evangelists use may have been more comprehensive 
than they enable us to see. If we notice the way in which 
they make use of Mark, a document which we have in 
our hands, we may even infer that it was possible for 
them to omit what we should regard as very character- 
istic or interesting things. For instance, neither takes 
over from Mark the fact that Jesus called the sons of 
Zebedee sons of thunder; neither mentions the irreverent 
exclamation of His friends. He is beside himself; neither 
reproduces the beautiful parable of the seed growing 
spontaneously, first the blade, then the ear, then the full 
corn in the ear; neither records the singular miracles of 
^ 31 flf.^ g 22 flf.^ ^YY^Q g^Qj-y Qf ^j^g widow's mites, which is 

borrowed by Luke but not by Matthew, shows us how 
one could take what the other left, and though the natural 
inclination (we might think) would be to take everything 
good for which there was room, it is obviously possible 
that there may have been things overlooked by both. The 
one question of great interest here is whether this lost 
document contained an account of the Passion of Jesus, 
Scholars are divided. B. Weiss, who has given unusual at- 



lyo JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

tention to the subject, thinks it did not; and he has been 
followed by the majority, including Harnack. Pro- 
fessor Burkitt, on the other hand, inclines to believe it did. 
While admitting that not a single phrase in the last three 
chapters of Matthew can be supposed to come from this 
lost source, he points out that some of the peculiar matter 
in the twenty-second chapter of Luke is actually given 
in earlier chapters of Matthew: in other words, there is 
found in Luke, chapter 22, matter which comes from 
this lost source. But if it be the case, as it really seems 
to be, that Luke gives his extracts from this source za^'e^?;? 
■ — in the order in which he found them — it is clear that 
the source did tell things about the Passion, and so was 
in some sense a gospel as truly atfMark.* 

The question, though interesting, is not vital. It is 
of less consequence to know the exact compass of the 
document than to be acquainted with its date and author- 
ship. Until quite recently it was held by all who ad- 
mitted its existence to be older than Mark. Opinions 
differed as to whether he had or had not made use of it 
in his work, but its antiquity was unchallenged. The 
opinion, too, was widely spread that it was of apostolic 
authorship. It was connected, perhaps ingeniously, 
perhaps also soundly, with another of the traditions 
of the Elder John preserved by Papias. We have al- 
ready quoted what this elder, an immediate disciple of 
Jesus, says about Mark. 'But concerning Matthew,' 
Eusebius proceeds in his quotation from Papias, 'the 
following statement is made [by him]: so then Matthew 
composed the oracles in the Hebrew language, and 
each one interpreted them as he could.' ^ The expression 

1 Weiss, Einleitung in das Neue Testament, § 45 ; Die Quellen der synop- 
tischen Ueherlieferung, 1-96; Harnack, Spriiche und Reden Jesu, 88-102; 
Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission, 133; Journal 0} Theo- 
logical Studies (Review of Harnack), viii. 454. 

2 Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., iii. 39. The translation is again from Professor 
Gwatkin. 



THE SECOND PRIMITIVE SOURCE— Q 171 

'composed the oracles' is probably identical in meaning 
with 'wrote his gospel'; but the term 'oracles' sug- 
gests that the main interest of the work in question is 
to be found in the words of divine authority which it 
contains. The description would suit quite well such 
a document as the vanished source used in common by 
our first and third evangelists; and as our first gospel, 
in the form in which we have it, is certainly not a trans- 
lation from Hebrew (or Aramaic), but a writing based 
chiefly on two sources, Mark and the one we are now 
discussing, which lay before the compiler (as they lay 
before Luke) in Greek, it was open to any one to pro- 
pound the hypothesis that the words of Papias referred 
not to our first gospel but to the Aramaic original of the 
source common to it and Luke — a source which would 
thus be of immediate apostolic authorship, the work of 
Matthew the publican. The first gospel owes its char- 
acteristic peculiarity to the fact that it amasses the oracles 
of the Lord and presents them so as to minister to the 
needs of the Church; and as preserving in a suitable his- 
torical framework the substance of the publican apostle's 
work, it might reasonably, though not with strict accuracy, 
be called the gospel according to Matthew. This com- 
bination of the data gains in plausibility when we con- 
sider that the lost source under consideration originally 
existed in an Aramaic form; * and although, in the nature 
of the case, it does not admit of demonstration, it has in 
the judgment of the writer a far higher degree of probabil- 
ity than any other hypothesis with which he is acquainted. 
It would, of course, be thoroughly discredited if we 
could accept the conclusion of Wellhausen, who from 
internal evidence infers that the lost source of Matthew 
and Luke was somewhat inferior to Mark in age, and 
altogether inferior to it in authority. His most im- 

^ See Wellhausen's notes on Luke 6 23 11*1. 



172 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

portant argument is the general one that the process of 
'Christianising' the material, which in Mark is practi- 
cally limited to the section chapter 8 "-lo *^, has in this 
document been carried through from beginning to end. 
Jesus everywhere speaks to His disciples as Christians, 
and that in a predominantly esoteric fashion. It is 
not only when He has His Passion in view that He re- 
veals Himself to them as the Messiah who is destined 
to pass through death to glory; on the contrary, He 
comes forward as Messiah from the first; His preach- 
ing throughout is directed to this end — to found His 
Church, and in doing so to lay the foundation of the 
Kingdom of God upon earth.^ What has been already 
said of Wellhausen's estimate of the 'Christian' section 
of Mark can be applied here also: even if we find in the 
source with which we are concerned features which 
prove that there was no solution of continuity between 
the life of Jesus and the life of the Church, we shall not 
for that reason hold that such features are necessarily 
unhistorical. We shall not feel obliged to argue that 
the Church has carried back its faith and experience 
into the life of Jesus, and is putting its own mind into 
the lips of its Master. Even if it were the case — which 
we do not believe — that the lost document was more recent 
than Mark, it would be a stupendous and groundless 
assumption that Mark meant to tell us all that was really 
known of the words and deeds of Jesus; and that every- 
thing in Matthew or Luke which goes beyond him was 
either unknown to him or regarded by him as of no value. 
The contents of the source which Matthew and Luke 
used in common besides Mark did not come into exist- 
ence in a moment. They were not produced out of 
nothing by the author who wrote them down. It is as 
certain as anything can be in history that in substance 

1 Wellhausen, Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 84. 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF Q 173 

they were being taught in Christian churches at the very 
same time and under the very same conditions in which the 
contents of Mark's gospel were being taught. Luke did 
not write to the excellent Theophilus to tell him what he 
had never heard before, but that he might know the cer- 
tainty about the things in which he had been instructed. 
Even if we cannot identify the author of this second source, 
nor fix the very year in which he wrote, we can be confident 
that it is for all practical purposes contemporary with 
Mark and equal with it in authority. Both have behind 
them the authority of the teaching, and of the teachers, 
who dominated the Church in the 'sixties. 

Nor is this authority prejudiced when we admit, as far 
as we need to admit, that the word of Jesus fructified in 
men's minds, and that there may be cases in which it is 
impossible to draw the line between the very words 
which Jesus uttered and the thoughts to which these 
words gave birth in the minds to which they were ad- 
dressed. Wellhausen argues that the spirit of Jesus 
lived on in the Church, and that the Church not only 
produced the gospel of which Jesus is the object, but also 
gave a further development to His ethics. This develop- 
ment took place, no doubt, on the foundation he had 
laid; and that in which His spirit expressed itself seemed 
to have intrinsically the same value as what He Himself 
would have said in similar case. It is not with the idea 
here that we have any quarrel, but with the inconsiderate 
application of it. There is no reason to doubt that many 
of the words of Jesus were preserved mainly by being 
preached, and * that they were liable in this way to a 
certain, or rather an uncertain, amount of modification 
with a view to bringing out the point of them in one or 
another set of circumstances. Every minister in preach- 
ing from a text sometimes expands the text in the person, 
so to speak, of him who uttered it; and if the original 



174 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

speaker was Jesus, he puts words into Jesus* mouth 
freely in doing so. In this sense Wellhausen is right in 
saying that it is the discourses in the gospels, and not 
the narratives, that are most liable to * development ' in 
the course of time; contrary to the older criticism which 
held that while legendary stories grew with a rank and 
marvellous fertility, the discourses of Jesus were com- 
paratively trustworthy. But the modern preacher who 
'develops' a word of Jesus in the person of the Speaker 
knows what he is doing; and it is only natural to assume 
that the primitive preacher or catechist knew also. He 
did not mean that the words he used were literally Jesus' 
words; they were the word of the Lord as he under- 
stood it. This, however, is quite a different thing from 
the wholesale ascription to Jesus in a historical book — 
and when all is said and done the gospels are meant to 
be read as narratives of fact — of a great mass of dis- 
courses which have no immediate connexion with Him. 
The result of Wellhausen's criticism, applied as he ap- 
plies it, is, as Jiilicher has said,^ that the most profound, 
simple and moving elements in the gospels are set down, 
simply because our literary evidence for them is supposed 
to be later than Mark, as of no historical value. The 
primitive Church is made to appear richer, greater and 
freer than its Head. For this, however, analogies are 
completely wanting; if the gospels as we have them are 
the fruits of faith, and not a historical testimony to Jesus, 
they are such fruits as have no example elsewhere. How 
did it come to pass that these fruits so suddenly ceased 
to appear on the tree of faith ? How did its fertility 
come to an end? And when Christian faith was yield- 
ing such gracious fruits apparently without conscious 
effort, when it uttered itself spontaneously in the parables 
of the Kingdom or the Sermon on the Mount, how are we 

» Theologische Litteraturzeitung^ 1905, col. 615. 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF Q 175 

to explain the fact that neither Paul nor any other New 
Testament writer — and surely they all had faith — could 
ever produce a page which even remotely reminded us of 
the manner of the Lord? Their whole attitude to the 
realities with which they deal — to God and man and truth 
— is other than His, and even when they speak in the power 
of His spirit it is not in His style and tone. After all, the 
words of Jesus have a seal of their own, and are not so 
easily counterfeited. It is true, as Wellhausen says, that 
truth attests only itself, not its author; but when the various 
self-attesting truths coalesce into the unity of the Speaker 
and His life — when, as Deissmann says, they are seen to 
be not separate pearls threaded on one string, but flashes of 
one and the same diamond — the truth and its author are 
not separable. The sum of self-attesting truths which 
finds its vital unity in Jesus guarantees His historical 
reality in a character corresponding to these truths them- 
selves, and the more we come under the impression of 
this character, the less disposed shall we be either to pre- 
scribe its measure beforehand, or to assume that vital 
and conscious relations between it and the Christianity 
in which it somehow issued are necessarily unhistorical. 
That Jesus left no written record of Himself is true. It 
is true also that what He wished to leave behind Him in 
the world was not a protocol of His words and deeds, a 
documentary attestation of them such as historians or 
lawyers might require; what He craved was a spiritual 
remembrance, a living witness in the souls of men born 
again by His words of eternal life. But the very men on 
whom He made the impression which made them Chris- 
tians, the very men who hung on His lips because His 
words were what they were, would not easily lose all sense 
of distinction between His words and thoughts and their 
own. The very power and wonder of the words would 
preserve their singularity, and, as has already been re- 



176 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

marked, the conspicuous fact in the New Testament is 
not the imperceptible way in which the words of Jesus 
merge into those of Christians, but the incomparable and 
solitary relief in which they stand out by themselves. 
The possibility of modification, of deflection, of * Chris- 
tianising' even, in applying these words in any given 
situation, is one which need not be questioned before- 
hand; the mind is subject to its own laws, and the spirit 
has its own liberties, even in dealing with the words of 
Jesus. But the broad contrast which has just been 
pointed out remains, and it justifies us, not only in ex- 
amining each instance on its merits, but in approaching 
the examination with a presumption in favour of the wit- 
nesses rather than against them. When we appeal to the 
discourses of Jesus in Matthew and Luke for testimony 
to the mind of Jesus regarding Himself or His work, 
this is the presumption which will determine our atti- 
tude. 

For the purpose which we have in view it is not neces- 
sary to refer further to the critical analysis of the gospels. 
We shall confine ourselves to the gospel of Mark, and 
to that second source, common to Matthew and Luke 
which in accordance with custom will be cited as Q. 
The limits of Q, as soon as we go beyond the matter which 
is guaranteed as belonging to it by its occurrence both in 
Matthew and Luke, are quite uncertain; and therefore 
we shall confine our investigation to the passages which 
have this guarantee.^ It is impossible to lay down before- 

1 This is the course followed by Harnack in his own investigation of Q — 
Spriiche u. Reden Jesu; and in his review of Weiss' s recent works, Die 
Quellen des Lukasevangeliums and Die Quellen der synoptischen Ueber- 
lieferung (in Theol. Litter aturzeitung, 1908 : 460 ff.), though he admits 
that Weiss gives an essentially correct description of the characteristics 
of Q, he can lay no stress on those passages in Weiss's reconstruction of 
it which depend upon one witness only. Weiss is practically certain of 
these, and of his restoration of them {Aufstellung der Matthausqtielle); to 
Harnack they are only possibilities. The general impression left on the 
mind of the writer by the study of all these works is that far greater allow- 



THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 177 

hand the precise line which the investigation must follow. 
In the opening sections of the gospel — those which narrate 
the baptism and the temptation of Jesus — we have both 
sources to appeal to; when we pass this point it will be 
convenient to consider first the testimony of Q, and then 
that of Mark, to the self -consciousness of Jesus. In 
pursuing this course, the method adopted must be left to 
justify itself by the result. Though no stress can be laid 
on the chronology of the gospels, there is an order in 
them of some kind, and as far as possible that will be 
followed. 

(b) Detailed study of the earliest sources as illustrating 
the self-consciousness of Jesus, 

The Baptism of Jesus 

(Mark I «-"; Matt. 3 """; Luke 3 "f-) 

Both in Mark and in Q Jesus is introduced to us in 
connexion with John the Baptist. He comes upon the 
stage of history when He presents Himself to John on 
the banks of the Jordan to be baptized. The synoptic 
gospels recognise John as the forerunner of Jesus, but 
they do not record any testimony of John to Jesus as the 
Christ. John, probably in the sense of his own weakness, 

ance must be made than is made in any of them for the influence upon the 
evangeHsts of other than documentary evidence in the writing of the gos- 
pels. Assuming that Luke knew a gospel narrative — say the healing of 
the paralytic or the parable of the sower — both from Mark and Q, we 
must remember that as a person living in the Christian Church it is a 
thousand to one that he knew it by having heard it told independently of 
either. Even if he tells it in the main on the basis of Mark or of Q, we 
are not bound to explain his divergences from either by conscious motives 
discoverable by us; to the writer, in spite of Weiss's claim and of Harnack's 
assent to it {ut supra, 465), it is as certain as anything can be that thou- 
sands of the divergences for which ingenious explanations are given are 
purely accidental, and have no motive or meaning whatever. In other 
words, 'oral tradition' is a vera causa operating far more extensively than 
the criticism of Weiss is disposed to admit. 
12 



178 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

and of his inadequacy to the task of regenerating Israel, 
spoke of the Coming One as mightier than himself, 
and as able to baptize with Holy Spirit and fire; but he 
did not expressly identify Him with Jesus. Yet when 
we consider the extraordinarily high estimate which 
Jesus had of John, and reflect that of all His contempora- 
ries John alone seems to have made any spiritual impression 
on Him, these lofty anticipations of the Coming One 
may not seem quite irrelevant to Jesus' consciousness 
of Himself. It is probably true to say that He felt Him- 
self, when He entered on His work, called and qualified 
to fulfil John's anticipations — the holder of a mightier 
power than the last of the prophets, and able in virtue 
of it to succeed where he had failed. 

But be this as it may, we come to a point of critical 
importance with the baptism of Jesus Himself. It was 
narrated in Q, as we can infer with certainty from the 
Temptation story, which both Matthew and Luke have 
taken from this source, and which in all its elements 
refers to the Baptism and to the voice which then de- 
clared Jesus Son of God. It is not Q's narrative of 
the Baptism, however, which has been preserved by our 
evangelists; at this point, with sHght modifications, both 
Matthew and Luke follow Mark. The record, marvellous 
as it is, is of the simplest. * And it came to pass in those 
days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was 
baptized by John in the Jordan. And straightway 
coming up out of the water He saw the heavens rent asun- 
der, and the Spirit as a dove descending upon Him : and 
a voice came out of the heavens, Thou art My beloved 
Son, in Thee I am well pleased' (Mark i »■"). The 
fact that the baptism of Jesus came at a later period to 
present difficulties to the Christian mind — difficulties 
which may be reflected in Matt. 3 " ^•' to which there 
is no parallel in Mark or Luke — is at least an argument 



THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 179 

that it actually took place.^ We can hardly, indeed, 
imagine a period at which there would not be difficulty 
in the idea that a person who was himself the object of 
religious faith — and this, as we have shown above, was 
always the character of Jesus in the Church— should 
submit to be baptized with a baptism of repentance 
which looked to remission of sins (Mark i ^). The 
faith which was embarrassed by the baptism, but found 
the fact in the gospel tradition, would never have given 
it that decisive signiiicance in the career of Jesus which 
it has in all our documents unless it had been able to 
appeal in doing so to the authority of Jesus Himself. 
It would rather have slurred it over or ignored it, as 
some suppose the author of the fourth gospel has done, 
or it would have represented it as taking place on account 
of others, not of Jesus Himself. In our fundamental 
source, however, the second gospel, the whole story 
is told as affecting Jesus alone. It is He, not John 
the Baptist, who sees the heavens rent and the dove 
descending; and it is to Him, not to John or the by- 
standers, that the heavenly voice is addressed. Thou 
art My beloved Son. It is no strained inference, but 
the natural impression made by this ancient narrative, 
that His baptism was the occasion of extraordinary spirit- 
ual experiences to Jesus, experiences which no doubt had 
something transcendent and incommunicable in them, 

I Weiss inserts Matt. 3 1* *• in his restoration of Q, and argues that in 
this, which for him is the oldest source of al], a vision of the Baptist only 
was recorded: it was John who saw the heavens open and the spirit de- 
scend; John to whom the heavenly voice was addressed (This is My Son, 
Matt. 3 17; not Thou art my Son, Mark i "). He gives literary expla- 
nations of how the variations which appear in our gospels arose; to the 
writer they are quite unconvincing. The evangelists must have heard 
the story a thousand times, quite apart from the version of it which was 
under their eyes as they wrote: and it is an unreal and impossible task to 
explain their divergences as due to literary exigencies connected with the 
adjustment of a text which has itself to be hypothetically reconstructed. 
Die Quellen der synoptischen Ueherliejerung, 2 f. 



i8o JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

but of which He gave His disciples such an idea as they 
could grasp in the narrative preserved by the evangelists. 

The significant features in this narrative are the descent 
of the Spirit and the heavenly voice. We do not ex- 
plain these when we speak of Jesus as being for the time 
in an ecstasy or rapture, we rather indicate the inex- 
plicable element in them. The descent of the Spirit 
signifies that from this time forward Jesus was conscious 
of a divine power in His life; the Spirit, whatever else 
is involved in it, always includes the idea of power, and 
power in which God is active. This consciousness of 
Jesus was attested by the future course of His life. When 
He appeared again among men, it was in the power of the 
Spirit, and mighty works were wrought by His hands. It 
is a mark of their historicity that the canonical gospels 
have none of those puerile miracles of the infancy by 
which the apocryphal gospels are disgraced; it is not till 
the man Jesus, in the maturity of His manhood, has been 
anointed with the Holy Spirit and power, that He begins 
to act in the character of the Anointed. But from this 
time He does begin, and the consciousness of divine power 
which must have attended Him from the outset of His 
ministry is, in however indefinite a form, the consciousness 
of having a place apart in the fulfilment of God's purposes, 
of being, in a word, the one mightier than himself for 
whom the Baptist looked. 

Nothing could be more gratuitous than to argue that 
the whole story of the Baptism of Jesus is here trans- 
formed by Christian faith. The fact of the baptism is 
supposed, on this view, to be puzzling in itself, and the 
difficulty inherent in it is got over by assimilating it to 
the Christian sacrament in which water and the Spirit 
are so far from being opposed to each other (as they are 
by John) that they normally coincide. It is literally 
preposterous to assume that Christian baptism set the 



THE BAPTISM OF JESUS i8i 

type for thc^t of Jesus; it is the baptism of Jesus which 
sets the type for the sacrament of the Church. When 
Loisy^ asserts that it is probable that tradition at first 
knew nothing but the simple fact of the baptism, and 
that the idea of the Messianic consecration created the 
narrative which we find in Mark, it is perhaps enough to 
reply that we do not see the probability. If Jesus was 
conscious, from this time on, of a divine power which 
took possession of His life and in which He entered on a 
new career for God, there is no reason why the narrative 
should not have come from His lips as it stands; and if 
He had no such consciousness — if the baptism was not 
in some sense a spiritual birthday for Him — we may as 
well say at once that we know nothing whatever about 
Him. Taking His anointing with spirit and power, on 
which the whole life depicted in the gospels is dependent, 
as, in the broadest sense which spirit and power can bear, 
indisputable fact, we must admit that Jesus stands before 
us from the very beginning of our knowledge of Him as a 
Person uniquely endowed, and probably therefore with a 
consciousness of Himself and of His vocation as unique 
as His spiritual power. 

This, indeed, is what is suggested by the words of 
the heavenly voice. It has often been remarked that 
this voice which, though we must call it objective, is 
yet a spiritual and not a physical phenomenon, utters 
itself in words of the Old Testament. The first clause, 
*Thou art my Son,' comes from the second Psalm, where 
it is addressed by God to the ideal King of Israel. The 
second clause, 'the beloved, in whom I am well pleased,' 
goes back in the same way to Isaiah 42, and recalls the 
Servant of the Lord on whom God puts His Spirit that 
in meekness and constancy He may bring forth judgment 
to the nations. It is impossible to suppose that this com- 

1 Les Evangiles Synoptiques, i. 107. 



i82 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

bination is accidental, and it is quite unnecessary to sup- 
pose that it is the work of the apostolic Church looking 
back on the way in which Old Testament ideals were 
united in the life of Jesus. The ideals of the Old Testa- 
ment were far more vivid to Jesus than they were to the 
apostolic Church, and we fail to do justice to Jesus unless 
we recognise this. Further, they were much more than 
ideals to Him; they were promises of God which came 
to have the virtue of a call or vocation for Himself. Often 
He had steeped His thoughts in them, but at last, in this 
high hour of visitation by the living God, they spoke 
to Him with direct, identifying, appropriating power. 
It was His own figure. His own calling and destiny, that 
rose before Him in the ideal King of the Psalmist, and 
the lowly Servant of the Prophet; it was His inmost con- 
viction and assurance from this hour that both ideals 
were to be fulfilled in Himself. The voice of God ad- 
dressed Him in both characters at once. 

We do not need to define either ideal more closely, 
and just as little the combination of the two, to see the 
importance of this. If the ideal King of the Psalmist 
and the lowly Servant of Isaiah are united in Jesus, 
then all the promises and purposes of God are consum- 
mated in Him as they can be in no other. This, from 
the first — that is, from the moment at which we are 
introduced to Him — is how He conceives Himself. It 
is in this conception of Himself and because of it that 
He enters on the work which the gospels describe. It 
is this consciousness of Himself which is the vindication 
of His whole attitude to men, and of the attitude of His 
followers to Him. It is no objection to the truth of this 
conception that Jesus did not begin His ministry by 
announcing it. To appeal to the nearest analogy, un- 
worthy though it be, who tells all that he hopes or aspires 
to at thirty? Yet a time may come for telling, and 



THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 183 

when it does come it may be apparent even in an ordinary 
life that unavowed convictions had inspired it all along, 
and that in these convictions lay the key to everything 
in it that was powerful or characteristic. Others only 
saw afterwards, but He whose life was involved could 
say from the beginning, Secretum meum mihi — I know 
myself and what I have to do. 

In particular, it is not enlightening here to employ 
such technical expressions as the Messianic consciousness 
of Jesus, or to argue that the expression *My Son,' as 
used by the heavenly voice, bears an 'ofhcial' Messianic 
meaning. The ideal King of the Psalm stands alone: 
he is a unique figure, with a unique calling in relation 
to the Kingdom of God. But though this is the hour at 
which in a flash of divine certainty His own identity 
with that ideal figure takes vivid possession of the mind 
of Jesus — or might we not rather say, because this is such 
an hour — the whole associations of a word like * official' 
are out of place. What we are dealing with is not of- 
ficial, but personal and vital. The gospels do not afford 
us the means of tracing the antecedent preparation for 
this supreme experience of Jesus, either on the psycho- 
logical or the ethical side; but it cannot have been un- 
prepared. It was not to any person at random, it was to 
this Person and no other, that the transcendent calling 
came; and it must be related in some way to what Jesus 
was before. Now the one thing which is stamped upon 
the New Testament everywhere, as the outstanding 
characteristic of Jesus, is His filial consciousness in rela- 
tion to God. This was what no sensitive spiritual ob- 
server could miss. It was so dominant and omnipresent 
in Him that it constrained Christians to conceive of 
God specifically as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
It is difficult, therefore, to suppose that Jesus could ever 
hear the words. This is My Son, or could ever repeat 



i84 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

them in teaching, without charging and suffusing them 
with this filial consciousness. The calling of the ideal 
King, who is spoken of by God as My Son, is not to be 
contrasted with this as official with personal; rather must 
we suppose that on the basis of this personal relation to 
the Father the consciousness of that high calling became 
suddenly and overwhelmingly real to Jesus. The con- 
sciousness, it might be put, of the Fatherhood of God, 
as something realised in Him as it was in no other, 
is the spiritual basis of all conceptions of His place, 
vocation, and destiny, and therefore it is not to be op- 
posed to these last nor excluded from them. This is 
the line also on which our minds are led by the one 
scene preserved from our Lord's earliest manhood in 
Luke 2 *^ ^- On the banks of the Jordan as in the 
courts of the Temple Jesus was about His Father's 
business. His consciousness of Himself, as determined 
by the heavenly voice, was solitary, incomparable, in- 
communicable; but it was the consciousness of one 
who before it and in it and through it called God 
Father; it was not official, but personal and ethical, 
filial and spiritual throughout. 

It is only another way of saying this if we remark that 
a quite unreal importance is often supposed to belong to 
the asking and answering of such questions as When 
did Jesus first claim to be the Messiah? When did 
the consciousness that He was Messiah awake in His 
own mind? What modifications, if any, did He intro- 
duce into the meaning of the term? All such questions 
exaggerate the official as opposed to the personal in the 
life of Jesus, and in doing so they undoubtedly mislead. 
Jesus was greater than any name, and we must interpret 
the names He uses through the Person and His experi- 
ences and powers, and not the Person through a formal 
definition of the names. However such titles as Messiah 



THE BAPTISM OF JESUS 185 

(or Son of God as a synonym of Messiah) may take 
shape as the investigation goes on, what we have to start 
from is the experience of an endowment with divine power ^ 
and of a heavenly calling to fulfil the grandest ideals of 
the Old Testament. This consciousness of divine power 
and of a unique vocation, it is no exaggeration to say, lies 
behind everything in the gospels. The words and deeds of 
Jesus, the authority He wields, the demands He makes, 
His attitude to men, assume it at every point. Whatever 
may have been the order of His teaching, whatever the 
importance in His historical career of the hour at which 
the disciples saw into His secret and hailed Him as the 
Messiah, there is something of far greater consequence 
— the fact, namely, that the life of Jesus, wherever we 
come into contact with it, is the life of the Person who is 
revealed to us in the Baptism. It is not the life of the car- 
penter of Nazareth, or of a Galilaean peasant, or of a simple 
child of God like the pious people in the first two chapters 
of Luke. It is the life of one who has been baptized with 
divine power, and who is conscious that He has been called 
by God with a calling which if it is His at all must be His 
alone. It is this which makes the whole gospel picture 
of Jesus intelligible, and which justifies the New Testa- 
ment attitude toward Jesus Himself. The attitude is 
justified only if the picture is substantially true; and 
it is not an argument against the narrative of the 
baptism, but an argument in favour of it, that it 
agrees with the whole presentation of Jesus in the 
gospels, and with the Christian recognition of His 
supreme place. It agrees with them in the large sense 
that the subject of the gospel narrative is from begin- 
ning to end a person clothed in divine power and con- 
scious that through His sovereignty and service the 
Kingdom of God is to come. 



i86 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

The Temptations 

(Mark i ^^f., Matt. 4 ' ", Luke 4 ^^^ ) 

That conception of the consciousness of Jesus with 
which He is introduced to us in the story of His baptism 
is confirmed and elucidated by the narrative of the temp- 
tation. This was found in the source common to Mat- 
thew and Luke, and is given in a more summary form 
in Mark. It is impossible to say how Mark comes to 
tell no more than he does, or why Matthew and Luke 
have so much fuller an account than he. The question 
is often discussed as if the two versions supplied by our 
gospels were all that had to be considered — as if Mark 
must have abridged the source common to Matthew and 
Luke, or as if that source must have expanded Mark. 
Surely there is every probability that the subject of these 
narratives was one which would have a familiar place in 
oral tradition, and might be known in this way in a more 
condensed or an ampler form. Why should not Jesus — 
to whom, unless it is pure fiction, the narrative must go 
back — have spoken of the strange experiences which 
succeeded His baptism, now with less and again with 
greater fulness of detail? At one time he might say no 
more than we find in Mark — that the hour of exaltation, 
in which He saw heaven opened, and had access of divine 
power, and heard the voice of God call Him with that 
supreme calling, was followed by weeks of severe spiri- 
tual conflict. He was in the wilderness, undergoing 
temptation by Satan; He was with the wild beasts, in 
dreadful solitude; yet He was sustained by heavenly 
help: the angels ministered to Him. At another time 
He might use the poetic and symbolic forms which we 
find in Matthew and Luke, and which were no doubt 
found in their common source, to give some idea of the 
nature and issues of this spiritual conflict. This not only 



THE TEMPTATIONS OF JESUS 187 

seems to the writer inherently credible, but far more pro- 
bable than that the imagination of the Church, working 
on the general idea that Jesus must have had a spiritual 
conflict at the hour as which He entered on the Messianic 
career, constructed out of His subsequent experience this 
representation of what it knew His conflicts to be. No 
doubt the temptations by which Jesus is here assailed are 
those by which He was assailed throughout His life, but 
that is only to say that they are real, not imaginary. A 
serious spirit with a high calling faces the world seriously, 
and with true and profound insight. It looks out on to 
it as it is. It sees the paths which are actually open 
to it there, along which it may go if it will, and which 
often seem to offer, a seductively short path to its goal. 
In face of the testimony of the gospels that Jesus did 
this, it is simply gratuitous to eliminate the temptation 
from His history, and to explain it by parallels from the 
mythical history of Buddha, or as the reflection of the 
Church upon Jesus, not the self-revelation of Jesus 
to the Church. The historical character of the narra- 
tive is supported by what most wiU admit to be an al- 
lusion to it in an undoubted word of Jesus: 'No one 
can enter into the house of the strong man and spoil his 
goods unless he first bind the strong man, and then he 
will spoil his house' (Mark 3 2^ Matt. 12 ^\ Luke 11 ^i^). 
In the wilderness Jesus bound the strong man. He faced 
and vanquished the enemy of His calling, and of all the work 
and will of God for man. He contemplated the false and 
alluring paths which promised to bear Him swiftly to the 
fulfilment of His vocation, and in the strength of His rela- 
tion to God He turned at once and finally from them all. 
A closer look at the Temptations throws an important 
light on Jesus' consciousness of Himself. They are all 
relative to the character in which He is presented at the 
Baptism, that of the Son of God, the ideal King in and 



i88 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

through whom God's sovereignty is to be estabh'shed. 
Jesus is this ideal King, and the question agitated in 
the Temptations is how His Kingship is to be reaHsed, 
how in and through Him the sovereignty of God is to 
become an accompHshed fact in the world. Conscious 
of His calling, conscious of the divine power which has 
come upon Him, He looks out upon the world, and 
upon the ways in which ascendency over men may be 
won there. The first temptation is concerned with the 
most obvious. Build the Kingdom, it suggests, on 
bread. Make it the first point in your programme to 
abolish hunger. Multiply loaves and fishes all the time. 
This, as we know from what followed the feeding of the 
five thousand, when the multitudes wanted to take Jesus 
by force and make Him their King, was a way to ascen- 
dency which lay invitingly open. Men would have 
thronged around Him had He chosen it, and the tempta- 
tion to do so lay in the fact that He had the deepest sym- 
pathy with all human distress. It was because He 
had compassion on the multitudes who were ready to 
faint in the wilderness that He spread a table for them. 
But he knew that the Kingdom of God could not come 
by giving bodily comfort a primacy in human nature. 
He said to Himself in the wilderness, as He said after- 
wards to others. Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all 
these things shall be added unto you. Labour not for 
the meat which perisheth, but for that which endureth unto 
everlasting life. The second temptation was one which 
dogged Jesus through His whole career. Jews demand 
signs, says Paul; and a ready way to ascendency over 
them was to indulge in marvellous displays of power. 
This is what is meant by the temptation of the pinnacle. 
*Cast thyself down,' means, 'Dazzle men's senses, and 
you will obtain the sovereignty over their souls.' This 
was what men themselves asserted, 'Show us a sign 



THE TEMPTATIONS OF JESUS 189 

from heaven.^ 'What sign showest Thou then that we 
may see and believe?' 'Let Him now come down from 
the cross.' It is not easy for us to understand a tempta- 
tion which was dependent on the possession of super- 
human power, but the important point to notice is that 
Jesus rejected appeals to the senses as a means to attain 
ascendency over men for God. He never attempted to 
dazzle. He made no use of apparatus of any description. 
An elaborate ritual of worship, awing and subduing the 
senses, would have seemed to Him, as a means of pro- 
ducing spiritual impressions and winning men for God, 
a temptation of the devil. He aimed at spiritual ends by 
spiritual means, and regarded anything else as a betrayal 
of His cause. And finally, as He looked upon the world 
in which the Kingdom of God was to come, He saw 
another kingdom established there already and in posses- 
sion of enormous power. ' It has been handed over to Me, 
and to whomsoever I will I give it.' This saying, which 
in Luke is put into the lips of Satan, is not meant to be 
regarded as untrue. There would be no temptation in 
it if it was untrue. It is the terrible fact, which confronts 
every one who is interested in the Kingdom of God, 
that evil in the world is enormously strong. It wields 
vast resources. It has enormous bribes to offer. For 
almost any purpose it seems able to put one into an ad- 
vantageous position. At times it seems as though unless 
one is willing to compromise with it, to recognise that it 
has at least a relative or temporary right to exist, it will 
be impossible to get a foothold in the world at all. Now 
this was the third temptation. Jesus would feel it the 
more keenly because His was truly a kingly nature, born 
to ascendency, exercising it unconsciously, and now called 
to realise the ideal and promise of God's King. It was 
urgent that the power which w^as His of right should 
actually come into His hands, and He would feel keenly 



IQO JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

how easy the first steps would become if He could only 
make some kind of limited and temporary accommoda- 
tion with evil. If He could get or take its help in any 
way it would do so much to clear His path. But He was 
conscious also that for the ideal King, through whom 
the reign of God was to be realised, this was impossible. 
He saw that to negotiate with evil was really to worship 
Satan, and that no advantage was worth the price. He 
said to Himself in this temptation what He afterwards 
said to all, What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole 
world and lose himself ? 

The interest of the Temptations, in connexion with 
our subject, lies in this: they show how the Kingdom oj 
God is in the mind of Jesus essentially hound up with 
Himself. Jesus is often represented now as teaching us 
things about the Kingdom of God, and then assuming an 
attitude of pure passivity, simply waiting on God to bring 
the Kingdom which no action of man, whether His own 
or another's, can hasten or hinder; but we see here that 
to His own mind the coming of the Kingdom is involved 
in His victory over these temptations. His initial tri- 
umph, in principle, over all the assaults of Satan — His 
resolute turning away, from the very beginning, from 
every false path — the entrance into the world and into 
the life of man of a Person thus victorious — are a revela- 
tion of what the Kingdom is, and a guarantee that at 
whatever cost it will prevail. This, it will not be ques- 
tioned, is how Christian faith conceives Jesus all through 
the New Testament; but it is of supreme importance to 
notice that it is how Jesus conceives Himself from the 
opening of His career. His relation to the Kingdom of 
God is in no sense accidental. It is in His attitude to 
the possibilities of earth that its true nature is revealed, 
and with Him it stands or falls. And what was said of 
the baptism may be repeated here : it is in this character 



THE SELF-REVELATION OF JESUS 191 

and in no other that Jesus stands behind every page of 
the gospel history. It is only this character which makes 
that history intelligible; and to try to undermine the 
narrative, only because we do not share the New Testa- 
ment attitude to Jesus, is as unwarranted historically as 
it is on all other grounds gratuitous. 

The Self-Revelation of Jesus in His Ministry 
It has been remarked already that no stress can be 
laid on the chronology of the gospels, but if it is difficult 
to arrange the matter in order of time, it is fatal to attempt 
to systematise it. Of all books on the New Testament, 
those which deal with the teaching and with the mind of 
Jesus are the least interesting, because they lapse as a 
rule into this false path. Nothing in the gospels is 
systematic. There is no set of ideas which recurs, as in 
John; no succession of questions emerges to be answered 
by the application of the same principles, as in Paul. 
Everything is in a manner casual: everything is indi- 
vidual, personal, relative in some way to the moment 
and its circumstances, though it may enshrine eternal 
truth. We may say of Jesus, with even less qualifica- 
tion, what has been said of Luther, that He always spoke 
ad hoc and often at the same time ad hominem. When 
words so spoken are reduced to a system the virtue has 
gone out of them; they no longer leave with us an im- 
pression of the speaker. But an impression of the Speaker 
is precisely what the words of Jesus do leave, and what we 
are in quest of; and consequently, at the risk of being 
tedious, it will be necessary to trace the self -revelation 
of Jesus as it is made from one situation to another, 
in one relation or another, by one significant utterance 
or another, in the pages of the gospels. Speaking gen- 
erally, the order followed will be that in which the various 
passages of Mark and Q occur in Huck's Synopse, and 



192 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

it must be remembered that it is not on any single passage, 
but on the cumulative effect of the whole, that the argu- 
ment depends. 

The summary account which Mark gives of the Gali- 
laean ministry (ch. i ^^^•) is no doubt to be taken as a 
summary: we cannot assume that on any given occasion 
Jesus used these very words. But there is no reason 
to doubt that they are a true summary, and truly repre- 
sent the mind and the message of Jesus. With His 
appearance 'the time was fulfilled': the great crisis 
had come in God's dealings with men. It is probably a 
mistake to say that the apocalyptic idea of a predestined 
course of events underlies this: the apocalyptic way of 
calculating times and seasons was foreign to the temper 
of Jesus, and He repeatedly disclaims it (Matt. 24^®; 
Acts I '). But if anything can be depended upon in the 
gospels, it is that He had the sense of living in a crisis 
of final importance: history up to this point had been, 
so to speak, preparatory and preliminary, but now the 
decisive hour had come. It was a gracious hour, and 
the announcement of what was impending was 'the 
gospel of God'; but it was an hour in which the true 
decision was a matter of life and death, and we shall see 
as we proceed how that decision turned upon a relation 
to Jesus Himself. The evangelist strikes the true key 
to the consciousness and the self-revelation of Jesus, 
when he speaks of the fulness of the time and represents 
Him as saying. The Kingdom of God has drawn near; 
repent and believe in the gospel. 

Jesus and the Twelve: The Conditions of Dis- 
cipleship 

(Mark 3 ^^" ; Matt. 10, and parallels in Luke) 

The first incident recorded by Mark is the calling of 
two pairs of brothers, Simon and Andrew, James and 



THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 193 

John, to a closer relation of discipleship. This is guar- 
anteed by the inimitable word, Follow Me, and I will 
make you fishers of men. This was His own task, to 
win and gather men for the Kingdom, and they were 
to help Him. The ascendency which He exercised in 
thus drawing men away from their worldly callings and 
hopes into association with Himself is quite indefinite, 
and even in yielding to it the four first disciples could 
have no distinct idea of what it involved. But they did 
yield. They left their nets and followed Him, and as 
they lived in His company, heard His words, saw His 
character and His works, the sense deepened in their 
hearts of His right to command. It is not, however, 
until the circle is enlarged by the appointment of the 
Twelve, and by Jesus' commission and instructions to 
them, that a vivid light is cast for us on Jesus' conscious- 
ness of Himself. Wellhausen has recently attacked the 
whole narrative of Mark at this point.* The giving of 
bynames, like Cephas and Boanerges, he argues, is not a 
historical act; in short, we have no historical act at all 
in Mark 3 ^^'^^; it is rather a set of statistics, presented as 
history — an index, in the form of a scene upon a lofty stage. 
Similarly, of Mark 6 ^"*^, which narrates the sending out 
of the Twelve in pairs, he says that it contains no his- 
torical tradition. The passage has great value as show- 
ing us the way in which the earliest Christian mission 
was carried on in Palestine, but it is of no value for the 
life of Jesus. Both Mark 3*^-*^ and Mark 6'-^^ are 
editorial sections in the gospel; they reveal something 
of the author but nothing of the subject. 

It is not easy to take this seriously. The Twelve 
are not to be eliminated from the history of Jesus by any 
such flimsy devices. There is far earher evidence for 
their peculiar standing in the Church than that of Mark. 

1 Das Evangelium Marci, 24 ff,, 45 f. 
U 



194 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

In I Cor. 15 ^ Paul mentions an appearing of Jesus to the 
Twelve. This is part of the tradition of the Jerusalem 
Church about the Risen Saviour which Paul learned 
when he returned to Jerusalem from Damascus within a 
few years of the resurrection. The Twelve had not 
arisen spontaneously and assumed the importance which 
Paul's language implies. They are mentioned frequently 
in Mark, quite apart from their formal appointment and 
mission (4 ^«, 9 ^, 10 ^\ 11 ", 14 ^«" ''' 2«' «), and they were 
known to the other early source used by Matthew and 
Luke (Matt. 19"^, Luke 22^*^). Presumably not even 
Wellhausen intends to deny that Jesus surnamed Simon 
Cephas, and that He called the sons of Zebedee 'our 
sons of thunder.' This last particular, which is pre- 
served by Mark alone (3 ^'), is usually and properly 
regarded as a proof of close connexion between the 
writer and the apostolic circle. But if Jesus gave these 
names, what is gained by saying that the giving of by- 
names is not an historical act? The evangelist probably 
does not mean us to understand that Jesus gave them 
as part of the formal act by which He 'made' the Twelve; 
but as He writes out the list of the Twelve, it comes 
quite naturally to Him to mention these surnames of 
promise or rebuke. They may have been first bestowed 
on other occasions — Cephas, for example, at Matt. 16 ^^, 
Boanerges perhaps at Luke 9 ^^ ^^ but to appeal to them 
to discredit the appointment of the Twelve is beside 
the mark. There is as little ground for Wellhausen's 
attack on their mission. He does not believe it to be 
historical, because though the experiment is successful 
it is not repeated, and the Twelve are for the future as 
passive and as wanting in independence as before. We 
have no such knowledge of the circumstances as enables 
us to say that this experiment if successful must have 
been repeated. The fact that a thing is not done twice 



THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 195 

is not a proof that it was not done once. When the Twelve 
returned from their experimental mission, a crisis was at 
hand in the ministry of Jesus; and from that time He 
kept them closely by Him, and devoted Himself almost 
exclusively to preparing them for the dark future which 
was now impending. 

The calling of the Twelve, then, being indisputably 
historical, what is its significance? It has no doubt a 
reference of some kind to Israel, the people of God. It 
hardly matters, for our purpose, whether we think that 
Jesus had in view the ancient Israel, and expected the 
Kingdom of God to be realised under its ancient organisa- 
tion; or whether when He spoke of the Twelve sitting on 
thrones and judging (that is, ruling) the twelve tribes of 
Israel, He was quite consciously using imaginative or 
poetic language, and had in view a new people of God 
in which the ideal of the old should be fulfilled. In 
either case, when He chose the Twelve, the new Israel 
of God was before His mind as something to be consti- 
tuted round them, and as something, at the same time, 
in which His own place would be supreme. He saw 
in His mind's eye, as they gathered about Him, what 
John saw in the apocalypse — the wall of the city having 
twelve foundations, and on them twelve names of the 
twelve apostles of the Lamb. Separated from every- 
thing else that is known of Jesus — separated, for ex- 
ample, from what we are told of His baptism, and from 
what we shall see in more articulate form later — this 
may seem fanaticism if ascribed to Jesus Himself, and 
extravagance in an interpreter of the gospels; but taken 
in its actual historical relations, as the gospels supply 
them, the writer regards it as simple truth. But what a 
revelation of the mind of Jesus it gives! He does not 
call Himself Messiah, or Son of God, or any other lofty 
name; but He acts, unassumingly so far as the out- 



196 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

ward form goes, yet in a way which indicates His con- 
viction that the fulfilment of all God's purposes — for 
nothing less is involved in the re-constitution of God's 
people — is to come through Him. 

When Jesus sent out the Twelve on the preliminary 
or experimental mission to which reference has been 
made, He gave them a charge or commission. This is 
summarised in Mark 6 ^'"j but what corresponds to it in 
Matthew fills the whole of a long chapter (ch. 10). There 
can be no doubt that this chapter, like the Sermon on 
the Mount, is a composition of the evangelist; he has 
gathered into it for catechetical or other practical reasons 
all the words of Jesus to His disciples which have any 
bearing on their work as missionaries. Some of these 
words are relevant to the historical occasion on which 
Matthew represents them as spoken; others are only 
relevant if the outlook of the speaker is conceived to be 
not on the Jewish world immediately around him, the 
Galilean cities and villages where he was usually so 
welcome, but on the Jewish world as it was after His 
death, that Judaean environment which in its representa- 
tives was so hostile to the disciples, or even on the wider 
Gentile world beyond. It does not follow, however, 
that the words put into the lips of Jesus in Matthew 10 
are not genuine, or that they misrepresent His conscious- 
ness of Himself. To a certain extent they have parallels 
in the eschatological discourse in Mark (Matt. 10 ^^'^^ 
being parallel to Mark 13 ^"^^), and to a much larger 
extent in Luke. In Luke, indeed, there is a peculiarity 
that we have two missionary or apostolic charges of 
Jesus, one to the Twelve (Luke 9 ^ ^O, and another to the 
Seventy (Luke 10^^). It is not necessary here to con- 
sider whether the mission of the Seventy has any his- 
torical character, or whether it is simply invented or 
assumed by the evangelist as a counterpart to that of 



THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 197 

the Twelve, a means of justifying, by appeal to Jesus, 
the Gentile as well as the Jewish mission. Even if this 
idea were in the evangelist's mind he has made no applica- 
tion of it. The words of Jesus which he gives, whether 
addressed to the Twelve or the Seventy, are substan- 
tially those which we find in Matthew addressed to the 
Twelve alone; and the Seventy in point of fact never 
approach Gentiles. They prepare the way of the Lore} 
in Palestine. Considering how little we know of the 
methods of Jesus, it is probably rash to say that the 
mission of this larger number of disciples only embodies 
a thought of Luke, and not a historical fact. 

The first point in which the evangelists are agreed is 
that Jesus in sending out His disciples imparted to them 
power over evil spirits. The importance which this 
power had in His own mind will appear later. What is 
to be observed here is that we see already Him who had 
been baptized with the Holy Spirit and power baptizing 
His followers with the same. It was a primary experi- 
ence of the Twelve that they owed to Jesus such a re- 
inforcement of their spiritual resources as enabled them 
to vanquish the most hideous manifestations of demonic 
power and malignity. They could heal those who were 
under the tyranny of the devil because He had sent and 
empowered them. It does not matter what theory we hold 
of demonic possession and its cure — whether we believe, 
as every one believed then, in bad spirits which invaded 
and victimised wretched men; or in mental and perhaps 
moral disorders ranging from hysteria to the wildest 
forms of madness — some experience of the disciples lies 
behind the words, He gave them authority over the 
unclean spirits. They could do what they could not do 
before because He enabled them to do it, and the sense 
of this is a rudimentary form of the specifically Christian 
consGiQUgfless. The greatness of Jesus would grow upon 



igS JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

them in a thousand ways, but this was one of the experi- 
ences in which it was signally if mysteriously made real. 
The power over unclean spirits belongs to the gracious 
side of the commission, but what strikes one most in the 
brief report of Mark (6"), with its parallels in Matthew 
(lo") and Luke (9^), is the severity with which Jesus 
speaks. He lives in the sense of the absolute signifi- 
cance of His message. It is not something on which He 
proposes to negotiate with men — a matter in regard to 
which there is room for reflection and for arranging 
terms. It is in the highest degree urgent, and it is a 
matter of life and death. ' Into whatsoever city ye enter 
and they receive you not, go out into the streets and 
say, Even the dust that cleaves to us from your city on 
our feet we wipe off against you. Verily I say unto you, 
it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in 
the day of judgment than for that city.' There is no- 
thing, it may be said, personal in this: nothing that 
tends to put Jesus into a place apart. Religion, as 
philosophers tell us, is always a form of the absolute 
consciousness; and in presenting His message in this 
absolute and uncompromising tone Jesus only exhibits 
Himself as a supremely religious spirit. Even if we 
could insulate the words just cited it might be doubted 
whether this interpretation did justice to them; but 
when we take them in connexion with all that has pre- 
ceded — with the consciousness with which Jesus entered 
on His work, as revealed in the narratives of the Bap- 
tism and Temptation, and with His communication to 
the disciples of His own power to cast out evil spirits, 
and so to give a kind of sacramental pledge that the 
Kingdom of God had drawn near — it is certain that it 
does not do them justice. Jesus counted for more than 
a voice in the preaching of the Kingdom, and though 
the Twelve might have been puzzled at the time to say 



THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 199 

for what more, they must have felt the quick of the matter 
touched when He said, Behold, it is I who send you 
forth as sheep in the midst of wolves (Matt. 10 ^®). There 
was a sense in which He could call the cause of God His 
cause, as not even the most devoted of prophets could do; 
He was identified with it and it with Him in a way to which 
the past afforded no parallel; and as this sunk ever deeper 
and deeper into the minds of His followers they grew un- 
consciously to a more adequate — let us say, a more Chris- 
tian — view of what their Master was, and of what ought 
to be their own attitude to Him. 

The second part of the charge to the Twelve in Mat- 
thew (chapter 10 ^' ^•) has parallels chiefly in the twelfth 
and fourteenth chapters of Luke. The situation which 
it contemplates is in the main that of the followers of Jesus 
in Palestine in the generation after His death. The various 
sayings of which it is composed are addressed, perhaps, 
rather to disciples in general than to the apostles; but 
they have a special application to those who led the new 
community and represented it before men. What we 
have to remember in reading it is that it was not spoken at 
one time, and certainly not on the one occasion when 
Jesus sent out the Twelve two and two; but it is a quite 
gratuitous supposition that the mind which it expresses 
is not the mind of Jesus, or that the words in which it is 
conveyed are not substantially His words. Some of them, 
as has already been pointed out, have parallels in the es- 
chatological discourse in Mark 13; and it seems to the 
writer incredible that Jesus should have left His cause and 
His followers in the world without a word to guide or 
brace them for the perilous future. He cannot but have 
looked forward to the task and the trials which awaited 
them, and the fact that much of what is recorded in this 
chapter has this task and these trials in view is no proof 
that the words are not His. It only shows that when the 



200 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

time came He felt and spoke as the call of the time re- 
quired. 

The very first words in Matthew (lo ^^ ^•) bring us to 
the heart of our subject. 'Beware of men. For they 
will hand you over to councils, and in their synagogues 
they shall scourge you. And ye shall be brought be- 
fore governors and kings, too, on My account (ivexev 
ijjLou), for a testimony to them and to the gentiles.' The 
words 'on My account' make it clear that in the mind of 
the writer at least the work of the disciples was somehow 
identified with Jesus. In all their preaching and heal- 
ing they must have referred to Him; the cause which 
they represented stood or fell with their relation to Him; 
it was for His sake that they themselves were identified 
with the cause. This, no doubt, is the truth. It answers 
to everything we know of the attitude of the earliest Chris- 
tians to Jesus and the gospel. But it has been questioned 
whether the words hexsv k[xoo, though they truly rep- 
resent the attitude of the first disciples, as truly represent 
the consciousness or the claim of Jesus. They occur 
again in ver. 39, and Harnack omits them there because 
they are wanting in the parallel in Luke (17^^).^ Here 
Luke has no independent parallel, but a parallel is found 
in Mark 13 ^ and (probably in dependence on Mark) in 
Luke 21 ^^. The passage in Mark occurs in the eschato- 
logical discourse, but not in the little (Jewish ?) apocalypse 
which many recognise as embedded in that discourse; 
on the contrary, it is generally admitted to be part of 
the oldest tradition concerning Jesus. But it also con- 
tains hexev ipLoo, which is varied in Luke into ivexev rod 
Svo/xaTog fxoo, for My name's sake. All three evangel- 
ists, it may be remarked, at the close of this paragraph 
in the eschatological discourse, unite in the synonymous 
expression did rd 6vo/id [loo (Matt. 24 ®, Mark 13 *', 

1 Spriiche und Reden Jesu, 63. 



THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 201 

Luke 21 *^). This alone would make us hesitate to 
question the words 'for My sake' in Matt. 10^^; but we 
hesitate all the more, indeed we feel that all ground for 
suspense is taken away, when we notice that Jesus in this 
very chapter says the same thing over and over, both ex- 
plicitly and implicitly, in terms which no one ventures to 
doubt. Thus in ver. 32 f.: 'Every one therefore who 
shall confess Me before men, him will I also confess 
before My Father in heaven. But whosoever shall deny 
Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father 
in heaven.' The parallel here between Matthew and 
Luke is exceedingly close, the use of the Semitic idiom 
ojuLoXoyeiv iv in both cvangelists being among the clearest 
evidences of the essentially identical translations which 
they employed of the Aramaic sayings of Jesus. ^ But 
if Jesus really used these words about confessing and deny- 
ing Him before men, and about being confessed and 
denied accordingly by Him before God, why should He 
not have said. Ye shall be brought before governors and 
kings for My sake ? It is impossible to exaggerate the 
solemnity of the utterance in Matt. 10 ^^^■, or the greatness 
of the claim which it makes. It says as clearly as lan- 
guage can say it that fidelity to Jesus is that on which the 
final destiny of man depends. It is the testimony of 
Jesus to men on which at last they stand or fall before 
God, and this testimony is concentrated on the question 
whether or not they have been loyal to Him. One in- 
dubitable word like this lights up for us much which 
might have remained obscure, and raises into full assur- 
ance much which might have left room for question. 
The mind out of which it sprung can only be the mind 
of one who is conscious that He is related as no other can 
be to the purposes of God and to the life of men; conscious, 
to express it otherwise, that the place in which New 
^ J. H. Moulton, Grammar of New Testament Greek, 104. 



202 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

Testament faith sets its Lord is the place due to Himself. 
It has often been pointed out that Jesus does not here rep- 
resent Himself as the final Judge by whose verdict man's 
destiny is decided, but only as the great Witness by whose 
testimony the verdict is determined. But it does not 
matter whether we call Him judge or witness. The 
real point is that what He speaks of as having absolute 
significance in the final judgment is the attitude of men 
to Himself as faithful or unfaithful. It is on this that 
everything depends; and if we bear on our minds a true 
impression of this tremendous saying, and admit that it 
reflects the mind of Christ about Himself and His rela- 
tion to God and men, we shall be slow to question the 
place which He holds in all New Testament faith. 

So much of the scepticism about the 'Christian' ele- 
ments in the gospel — so much of the disposition to ascribe 
them to the faith of the Church in the Risen Lord instead 
of to the historical Jesus — rests upon the failure to ap- 
preciate words like this, that it is worth while to insist 
both on their genuineness and their meaning. They are 
not only found both in Matthew and in Luke, but, as has 
just been observed, they are found in both with a pecu- 
liarity of expression {oiioXoyeiv h) which shows that the 
evangelists used the same translation of an Aramaic 
source. The saying therefore was current and on record, 
in the language in which Jesus spoke, before it was taken 
into our gospels. The fact that Luke speaks of Jesus 
confessing or denying men 'before the angels of God,' 
while Matthew has ' before My Father in heaven,' may not 
require any particular explanation: Luke may have 
unconsciously conceived the scenery of the final judg- 
ment more picturesquely than Matthew. But it is prob- 
able that this variation, as well as Luke's use of 'the 
Son of Man' (in ch. 12^) where Matthew has 'I,' are 
rather to be explained by reference to a similar passage 



THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 203 

found in all the evangelists (Mark 8 ^^, Matt. 16 2^, Luke 
9 26). There the angels and the Son of Man are combined 
in the picture of the judgment, and the familiarity of that 
solemn scene would involuntarily occasion such remi- 
niscences of it as can here be traced in Luke. The free- 
dom with which the essential import of the words of 
Jesus is given only sets that import in relief. In words 
which circulated in the Church from the beginning He 
proclaimed the absolute significance of His own person, 
and identified loyalty to Himself with loyalty to God and 
His cause. One of the peculiarities of the fourth gospel 
on the ground of which its historical character has been 
depreciated is that it is perpetually emphasising this 
absolute significance of Jesus in abstract forms. It 
represents Jesus saying of Himself I am, ^y^ etfit, with- 
out any predicate, as if the evangelist in his sense of 
Jesus' greatness had become inarticulate. It is as though 
he had something to say about his Lord — or rather as 
though Jesus had something to say about Himself — 
to which no human language was equal; the absolute 
unqualified 'I am ' (John 8 ^^"^^ : also ver. 58) ? means 
that no words can exhaust His significance; He is the 
all-decisive personality on relation to whom everything 
turns. It cannot be questioned that the fourth gospel 
is written in the language of the evangelist rather than in 
that of Jesus: but is there anything in its boldest asser- 
tions of the absolute significance of Jesus which tran- 
scends this thoroughly attested word in Matt. 10 ^^? The 
writer is unable to see it. The attitude to Himself on 
the part of men which is here explicitly claimed by Jesus 
— the absolute loyalty which involves an absolute trust 
— it is literally impossible to transcend. It is not only 
in Christian faith, as we find it expressed in the apostolic 
epistles, but in the consciousness of Jesus, that this 
religious relation of men to Him is rooted. It is not only 



204 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

that they identify themselves with Him in a fidelity in- 
distinguishable from that which is due to God alone, but 
that He, in the most solemn, explicit, and overpowering 
words, requires from them that identification, and makes 
their eternal destiny depend upon it. 

This is the more remarkable when we consider the 
condition under which this loyalty to Jesus has to be 
displayed. It may require. He tells His followers, the 
sacrifice of the tenderest natural affection. The connex- 
ion between Matt. lo ^^ and Matt. lo ^^ may be due 
to the evangelist — the parallels are not connected in Luke 
— but even if it is, it answers to the truth. When Jesus 
claimed confession. He thought of what would make 
it hard; and whether He spoke of this at the moment 
or not. He did speak of it, and Matthew appropriately 
introduces His words here. The parallel in Luke is not 
close, so much so that Harnack doubts whether the com- 
mon source on which the evangelists so largely depend 
does lie behind them at this point. Even if it does not, 
he holds that in the last resort some common source is 
implied; and we may fairly say that whether or not we 
are dealing with the very words of Jesus, we are in con- 
tact with His mind. Matthew's report is the simplest. 
'Think not that I came to send peace on the earth: I 
came not to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set 
a man at variance against his father, and the daughter 
against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her 
mother-in-law: and a man's foes shall be they of his 
own household. He that loveth father or mother more 
than Me is not worthy of Me; and he that loveth son or 
daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.' Perhaps 
the key to this passage is to be found in the consideration 
that Jesus speaks in it out of His own experience. Fidelity 
to God on His part introduced misunderstanding and 
division into the home at Nazareth. His mother could 



THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 205 

not comprehend Him. His brothers did not believe in 
Him. We can see from the incident preserved in Mark 
3 2^ ^-j ^^ ^-j and Matt. 12 ^^ ^^ what painful tension resulted 
in the family relations. Jesus must have loved His 
mother and His brothers with a natural affection as pure 
and strong as His nature; can we estimate the pain it 
cost Him to recognise that their influence over Him was 
deliberately exerted to obstruct or frustrate His work? 
If the sword of which Simeon prophesied pierced the heart 
of Mary as she heard her Son say, Who is My mother 
and who are My brothers? — ruling her and them alike 
out of His life as unable to understand and not entitled to 
interfere — did it not pierce His own heart also ? He knew 
in experience the pang it cost to be thus cruel to what 
was after all a genuine natural affection; but, though 
He felt the pain more keenly than those on whom it 
was inflicted, His calling demanded that He should be 
thus cruel; and the law under which He Himself lived 
was that to which He called all His followers. 

Only, there is one significant difference. What He 
does for the sake of His calling. He requires them to do 
for His sake. The consciousness of His unique signifi- 
cance, of the solitary and peculiar place which He holds 
in the working out of the purposes of God, is always 
apparent when He speaks of His having come for this 
or that end. It is so, for example, in Matt. 5 ^^ (I came 
not to destroy, but to fulfil) , or in Matt. 9 ^^ (/ came not 
to call the righteous but sinners), or in Luke 19^*^ {The 
Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was 
lost); it is so here when He says, / came not to bring 
peace but a sword. Jesus is thinking and speaking 
deliberately about Himself and His work in the world, 
and in what amazing words He speaks! He contem- 
plates the agonising disruption of families which will take 
place according as He is or is not accepted by the mem- 



2o6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

bers of them, and He says deliberately that the dearest 
and most intimate bond is to be broken rather than the 
bond of fidelity to Him. Whom does the man make 
Himself, what place does He venture to claim in the 
relations of God and human beings, who with clear 
consciousness says — He that loveth father or mother 
more than Me is not worthy of Me, and he that loveth 
son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me? 
This is personal, concrete language, asserting an im- 
mediate relation of the Speaker and of all who hear 
Him; but it is for this very reason far more wonderful 
than any formal assumption of a title or a dignity could 
be. It makes a far deeper impression on us, if it makes 
any impression at all, than if Jesus had claimed in set 
terms to be the Messiah or the Son of God or the Son 
of Man. There is something in it which for boldness 
transcends all that such titles suggest. It involves the 
exercise of whatever authority we can conceive them to 
confer: it exhibits Jesus acting as one too great for any 
title to describe — as one with right to a name which is 
above every name. It is thoroughly in harmony with 
the utterance already considered about confessing and 
denying Him; and all the more if it were spoken in 
another context does it justify us in believing that, 
wonderful and almost incredible as it is, it is a vital 
part of the self-revelation of Jesus. We repeat that 
there is nothing in the New Testament, not even 
in Paul or John, which goes beyond it; and it will 
be admitted, unless we wantonly deny that it is from 
the lips of Jesus, that that is no true Christianity which 
comes short of it. 

Much interest has gathered round the passage in Luke 
which is usually and no doubt rightly regarded as parallel 
to this, because of its use of the extraordinary word 'hate.' 
*If any man comes to Me and does not hate his father 



THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 207 

and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, 
yes and his own Hfe also, he cannot be My disciple' 
(Luke 14^^). There is a certain amount of generalisa- 
tion here, which may be editorial, for Luke is discussing 
the conditions of following Jesus; but the mind of the 
Speaker and the claim He makes upon others are in- 
distinguishable from what we find in Matthew, and 
curiosity or perplexity centres on the word 'hate.' It is 
often assumed that this is a fanatical extravagance, 
conceivable enough in a Church maddened by persecu- 
tion, and hardly knowing what it said in the vehemence 
with which it asserted its fidelity to Jesus, but inconceivable 
in the lips of Jesus Himself. This, however, is not so 
clear. Loisy is disposed to think that as the most ex- 
pressive and the most absolute the formula of Luke 
may be more primitive than that of Matthew. The 
latter softens down the terrible severity of the original: 
to say that we must not love father or mother, son or 
daughter, more than Jesus, is not so staggering as to say 
that we must hate them all to follow Him. It suits 
better the reality of existence and the common condition 
of men.^ The question is a difficult one, and perhaps 
not to be answered at all by weighing Matthew and Luke 
against each other. The conditions of discipleship 
must often have been discussed by Jesus, and it may be 
that where divergences of this kind occur we have to 
consider not two reports of the same saying, but two 
lessons on the same subject. Such memorable words 
of Jesus were no doubt familiar in the Church, not only 
through Matthew and Luke, or through a written source 
antecedent to them, but through the oral teaching of 
the original disciples; and even if Matthew and Luke 
rested in the main on a common document for their 
knowledge of the Lord's words, there is no reason why 

2 Les JSvangiles SynopHqties, i. 894. 



2o8 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

they should not have been influenced here or there by 
reminiscences of these words in forms famiHar to them 
independently of that document. It is not necessary to 
suppose that Matthew mitigated the severity of Luke, 
or that Luke intensified to fanaticism the austerity of 
Matthew. There may be no intention at all in the 
differences between them. If an opinion may be ex- 
pressed on purely subjective grounds, the writer is in- 
clined to agree with Loisy that the term 'hate* goes 
back to Jesus. But it is surely a mistake to say that it 
suggests the small account {le peu de cas) which is to be 
made of family bonds and affections where the Kingdom 
of heaven is concerned. There is nothing in either 
evangelist about the Kingdom of heaven; what Jesus 
speaks of in both is the relation of men to Himself — their 
being worthy or not worthy of Him, able or unable to 
be His disciples. His significance is not merged in the 
Kingdom; it is the very peculiarity of the passages that 
the significance of the Kingdom is absorbed in Him. 
Psychologically it seems probable that the terrible word 
'hate' expresses the pain with which Jesus Himself had 
made the renunciation which He demands from others. 
He knew how sore it was, and 'hate' is a kind of vehe- 
ment protest against the pleas to which human nature, 
and much that is good in it, as well as much that is evil, 
is only too ready to give a hearing. It is as though He 
could not afford to let these tender voices be heard, so 
painful would it be to silence them. But this is the 
very opposite of making small account of them — peu de 
casj as M. Loisy puts it — and we are glad to think it is 
the very opposite. 

In both Matthew and Luke the saying which requires 
the sacrifice of natural affection is followed immediately 
by another which raises the claim of Jesus, if it be pos- 
sible, to a still higher point. In Matthew's form it runs, 



THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHlP 209 

* And he that doth not take his cross and follow after Me 
is not worthy of Me' (Matt. 10 ^®). The habit of general- 
ising the idea of the cross, and applying to it any diffi- 
culty or pain that comes in the way of duty, blinds many 
to the extraordinary force of these words. The cross 
was the instrument of execution, and the condemned 
criminal, as we see from the case of Jesus Himself, had 
to carry it to the place of punishment. The EngHsh 
equivalent of the words in Matt. 10^® is that no one is 
worthy of Jesus who does not follow Him, as it were, 
with the rope round his neck — ready to die the most 
ignominious death rather than prove untrue. Whether 
ver. 39 was spoken in this connexion or not, it was again 
a true instinct which led the evangelist to introduce it 
here: 'He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that 
loseth his life for My sake (evexev ifiou) shall find it.' The 
typical Christian is the martyr, the man who lays down 
his life in the cause which is identical with Jesus; it is 
he who is sure of immortality: the life of the Kingdom 
of God, incorruptible and glorious, is his. On the other 
hand, the man who, when it comes to the decisive point, 
declines the cross and falls short of the supreme devotion 
required of the martyr, forfeits everything. In the im- 
mortality of which the martyr is assured he has neither 
part nor lot; in saving his life he has lost it. It is not 
to be doubted that this is the primary meaning of the words 
in the gospel, however they may have to be attenuated 
to match with circumstances in which no one is crucified 
or hanged for following Jesus; and, read in this sense, 
they confirm and deepen the impression of all that precedes. 
To the use which has just been made of this passage 
two objections are commonly raised. One is that the 
saying about taking up the cross obviously refers to the 
death of Jesus as something which had already taken 
place, and that therefore it cannot be regarded as coming 
14 



210 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

from Jesus Himself. Holtzmann ^ even thought at one 
time that such passages as Gal. 2 ^^^-j where Paul speaks 
of being crucified with Christ, were the antecedents of 
the gospel sayings about the cross. But as Loisy — who 
nevertheless questions the genuineness of the words 
ascribed to Jesus — points out, the meaning of Paul is not 
that of the passage before us. ^ When the true ineaning 
here is fixed, the writer can only say that he sees no 
difficulty whatever in believing that Jesus spoke in pre- 
cisely such terms. He was not the first person to be 
crucified; and though crucifixion was not a Jewish but a 
Roman punishment, it was one that a hundred years of 
Roman government must have made sufficiently familiar 
and terrible even to the Jews. If Jesus could say to His 
followers. The man who is not ready to face the most 
shameful death in My cause is not worthy of Me, there 
is no reason why He should not have said, The man 
who does not take up his cross and follow Me is not 
worthy of Me. The fact, which His hearers certainly 
could not foresee at the moment, that He was Himself 
to die upon the Cross, would give a singular pathos to 
His words when they recalled them afterwards; but a 
knowledge of that fact was not necessary to the under- 
standing of them. The other objection refers to the 
words hexev ifiou in Matt. 10^^. In what is regarded as 
the parallel saying in Luke 17^ — 'Whosoever shall seek 
to gain his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose his 
life shall preserve it' — hsxev kfxoo is wanting. Hence 
Harnack in his restoration of Q would omit them from 
this saying: he thinks Matthew has introduced them from 
Mark.^ On this ground some would object to the use 
which we make of the words as throwing light on Jesus' 
consciousness of Himself; what He says of saving the 

1 Handcommeniar, ad loc. ^ Les Evangiles Synoptiqties, i. 895. 

' Spriiche u. Reden Jesu, 63. 



THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 211 

life and losing it (the objection runs) is said with the ut- 
most generality; it is a law of the Kingdom of God, 
but it has no necessary relation to Him. That it is a 
law of the Kingdom of God is true, but that it has no 
necessary relation to Jesus must not be taken for granted; 
that is the very point at issue. The whole burden of 
the words of Jesus, as we have read them hitherto, is that 
He has a relation to the Kingdom of God which makes it 
possible for Him to say things which no other could say; 
and it may quite well be so here. Not that we should lay 
any stress on the occurrence of ivexev ifiod in Matt. 10 ^^ 
It is quite likely that a saying which Jesus must often have 
repeated, and which occurs twice in both Matthew and 
Luke, was not always given in exactly the same words. 
The principle might sometimes be stated in its absolute 
generality, and sometimes so as to bring out the peculiar 
way in which Jesus was identified with the cause for which 
men were to be prepared to die. That He was identified 
with it in some peculiar way has been made abundantly 
clear already, and does not depend in the least on whether 
hexev kp-oo was introduced into Matt. 10 ^^ by the evan- 
gelist or not. The parallel in Luke 17 ^^, which omits it, 
is certainly in every other respect secondary and inferior 
to Matthew: it is the evangelist there who is responsible for 
Tztpiizoiriaaadai and ^woyov^ffec, and who may be responsible 
for the absence of evexev I/jlou. In the passage in which 
Mark preserves this saying, and in which Matthew and 
Luke repeat it (Mark 8^% Matt. 1625, Luke g^^), all 
three agree in inserting the words. But, as has already 
been remarked, the legitimacy of using the passage to 
illumine the consciousness of Jesus does not depend 
upon whether on any given occasion he added ivexev 
ifiod when He spoke of saving the life or losing it. 
The principle of that addition is secured if we admit 
that Jesus said, He that loveth father or mother more 



212 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

than Me is not worthy of Me, and he that taketh not 
his cross and followeth after Me is not worthy of Me; 
the evangelist not only acted with a good conscience, he 
wrote out of the same mind of Christ which is revealed 
in ver. 39 when he inserted (if he did insert) hsxev kiioh 
in ver. 40. There is nothing theological in the attitude 
of Jesus here, no filling of a role, whether it be the Mes- 
sianic or another, but there is the revelation of a con- 
sciousness to which history presents no parallel. Con- 
sider how great this Man is who declares that the final 
destiny of men depends on whether or not they are loyal 
to Him, and who demands absolute loyalty though it 
involve the sacrifice of the tenderest affections, or the 
surrender of life in the most ignominious death. It is 
hard to take it in — so hard that multitudes of minds 
seem to close automatically against it, and yet there is 
nothing surer in the gospel record. 

The real difficulty in accepting these sayings is the an- 
tipathy of the general mind to the supernatural. It is 
one form of this when people refuse to believe in miracles, 
and declare that a man who can still a storm with a 
word, or feed five thousand people with five loaves, or 
call the dead to life, is a man with no reality for them. 
The Jesus who lived a historical life must have lived it 
within common historical and human limits, and when 
actions are ascribed to Him which transcend these limits, 
we know that we have lost touch with fact. The same 
intellectual tendency which leads to this conclusion really, 
however, pushes much further. Its latent conviction 
is not only that Jesus must only have done what other 
people could do, but that Jesus can only have been what 
other people are. The mystery of personality is ad- 
mitted and perhaps enlarged upon by those who thus 
judge, but the measure of Jesus is taken beforehand. 
A person who seriously says what Jesus says in Matt. 



THE CONDITIONS OF DISCIPLESHIP 213 

jQ 32-38 jg g^ person for whom their world has no room, 
and they have no disposition to reconstruct it so that 
it shall have room. Such a person is not one more added 
to the population, who can be accommodated or can 
find accommodation for himself, like the rest. He is 
not another like our neighbours, with whom we can 
negotiate, and to whom we can more or less be what 
they are to us. He stands alone. In the strictest sense 
which we can put upon the words He is a supernatural 
person. He claims a unique place in our life. As our 
examination of the New Testament has shown. His 
followers have always given Him such a place; and what 
we wish to insist upon is that in doing so they have not 
propagated a religion inconsistent with His will, but have 
only recognised the facts involved in His revelation of 
Himself. 

It may quite well be that there are those who do not 
wish to give Him the place He claimed, and the place 
He held from the beginning in the faith of His disciples. 
It is impossible to have a merely intellectual relation 
to a person: all relations to persons are moral. The 
person who comes before us speaking as Jesus speaks in 
this passage is least of all one in whom we can have only 
a scientific interest. If we admit the reality of the Per- 
son, we feel at once that He not only said these things 
to men in Palestine, but is saying them to ourselves now; 
and to feel this is to be brought face to face with the su- 
preme moral responsibiHty. It is not always in human 
nature to welcome this, and the instinctive desire of human 
nature to avoid responsibility so exacting and tremendous 
is no doubt a latent motive in much of the disintegrating 
criticism of the self-revelation of Jesus. It is not saying 
anything personal to say this. There is that in man 
which does not wish to have anything to do with such a 
person as Jesus here reveals Himself to be; and when that 



214 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

element in man tells upon the criticism of the gospels, it 
tells as a solvent on all that gives Jesus His peculiar place. 
Nevertheless, His place is sure. There are things too 
wonderful for invention or imagination, things which 
could never have been conceived unless they were true; 
and not to speak of the witness of the Spirit, or their his- 
torical authentication, the sayings of Jesus that we have 
just been considering belong to this class of things. We 
should accept them, were it for nothing else, because 
of the incredible way in which they transcend all imagin- 
able words of common men. 

The Sermon on the Mount 

(Matt. 5-7, Luke 6 ^o-^^, and other parallels to Matthew) 

A considerable part of the matter common to Matthew 
and Luke is found in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 
5-7, Luke 6 2°"*^). This sermon, as it is presented in 
Matthew, is to a large extent the composition of the 
evangelist, but it is not an arbitrary or free composition. 
Comparison with Luke shows that the framework of it 
was fixed before either evangelist wrote: it began with 
beatitudes and ended with the parable of the builders 
on the rock and the sand, and it had as its kernel the 
enforcement, in the boldest and most paradoxical terms, 
of the supremacy of the law of love. In all probability, 
therefore, an actual discourse of Jesus, corresponding 
to this in outline, lay behind it; and when Matthew, 
according to his custom — a custom which we have just 
seen illustrated in His charge to the Twelve — expands 
this by introducing into it congruous or relevant mat- 
ter which strictly belonged to other occasions, we have 
no call to say that he is misrepresenting Jesus. In 
point of fact, a large proportion of what he does intro- 
duce, though not found in Luke's Sermon on the Mount, 
is found elsewhere in the third evangelist, and is recog- 



THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 215 

nised by critics as belonging to the oldest stratum of 
evangelic tradition. It is impossible to evade the im- 
pression that in both evangelists the sermon has the 
character of a manifesto, and it is the more important 
therefore to read it with a view to the self-consciousness 
of the Speaker. It may be alleged, indeed, that this 
character of manifesto is imposed upon it by the evan- 
gelists, and that it is only their conception of Jesus which 
can be inferred from it, not Jesus' sense of His own 
position and authority. Perhaps if the Sermon on the 
Mount stood alone in the gospels the case for this opinion 
would have more weight, but when we remember the 
self-revelation of Jesus in such utterances as have already 
been examined, we shall probably feel that we ought 
not to be too hasty in declaring that this or that is due not 
to Him but to the reporter. 

There are three particulars which we have to consider 
in this connexion. 

(i) Both in Matthew and in Luke the sermon begins 
with beatitudes, and though the beatitudes differ con- 
siderably both in number and in expression they have 
this singular feature in common, that at a certain point 
the address, so to speak, becomes more personal; the 
beatitude is put with emphasis in the second person, and 
— what is to be particularly noticed — the personality of 
Jesus Himself is introduced into it. 'Blessed,' it runs 
in Matthew, 'are ye when men shall revile you and per- 
secute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely 
for My sake^ (5"). In Luke it reads, 'Blessed are ye 
when men hate you and when they separate you and 
reproach you and cast out your name as evil (or: give you 
a bad name^) for the Son of Man's sake.'' When we re- 
member that the words of Jesus were at first preserved 

> Wellhausen thinks the Aramaic original had this meaning : Das 
Evangelium Lucae, 24. 



2i6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

by being preached, we need not be astonished at such 
variations as the one underlined. To the preacher, Jesus 
and the Son of Man were one, but the Son of Man was a 
solemn way of saying Jesus; and it would be natural for 
him to put this title into Jesus' lips whenever he was re- 
producing words in which the personality of the Speaker 
was of signal importance. There is not more in 'for the 
Son of Man's sake' than in 'for My sake,' but it has a 
certain rhetorical advantage; there is more in it for the 
ear and the imagination; and when the word of Jesus was 
not backed, so to speak, by His bodily presence, but only 
reported by a preacher, we can understand the preacher's 
motive for preferring the title to the pronoun. Harnack, 
however, and many others have argued that here, as at 
Matt. lo^^, the words referring to the person of Jesus 
should be omitted altogether.^ The mere fact that 
Matthew and Luke vary in reporting them, in the way 
which has just been explained, is certainly no reason for 
omitting them: and just as little are the other variations 
which have some MS. support. The old Syriac versions 
read 'for My name's sake,' which is possibly not a vari- 
ant, but an idiomatic rendering of eVexev kiiod\ and it is 
only a mechanical repetition from the previous verse 
when some 'Western' MSS. read 'for righteousness' 
sake' instead of 'for My sake.' There is no authority 
whatever for any form of the beatitude which does not 
represent the reproach and persecution of which the dis- 
ciples were the objects as taking place on account of some- 
thing; and if Jesus could speak of Himself as we have seen 
Him speak in the charge to the Twelve — if He could say, 
Whoso confesseth Me before men, him will I also confess 
before My Father in heaven — there is no reason why He 
should not have said, Blessed are ye when men shall revile 
you for My sake. The truth rather is that the suffering 

*See above, p. 210: Harnack, Spriiclie u. Reden Jesu, 40. 



THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 217 

which good men always endure in a bad world — that is, 
suffering for righteousness' sake (Matt. 5 ^^) — becomes, 
where the disciples of Jesus are concerned, definitely and 
specifically suffering for His sake. That is not only their 
consciousness about it, but His; it is not only the mind 
of the evangelists which we encounter in this hsxev i/jLod 
or evexsv rod uloo too avOpibnoo] it is the mind of the Lord 
Himself.^ We cannot measure what it means that a person 
who lived a human life like others should identify Him- 
self in this extraordinary way with the cause of God and 
righteousness and should, it is not enough to say dainty 
but rather assume that He will obtain, that martyr devo- 
tion to which only righteousness and God are entitled; but 
until we see this we do not see Jesus. A beatitude com- 
bines the expression of a rare and high virtue with a rare 
and high felicity: what are we to say of the Person for 
whom the supreme beatitude is that men should suffer 
shame for His sake? We may surely say that He is 
revealing Himself as the Person to whom the only legit- 
imate attitude is the attitude of the New Testament 
Christians to their Lord. 

(2) The second point in the Sermon on the Mount 
which calls for particular consideration here is what may 
be described as the legislative consciousness of Jesus. 
A great part of the sermon in Matthew — that in which 
Jesus contrasts the new law of the Kingdom with what 
was said to them of old time — is not reproduced in Luke, 
but it can hardly have been unknown to him. In ch. 
6^^^- he has a parallel to that critical part of it which is 
preserved in Matt. 5^^^', and in ch. 6^^ the peculiar 
and awkward expression ^Xkd. ofiTv Xiyo) toT? dxoooofftv 
(but I say unto you that hear) seems most easily ex- 
plained as due to the influence of the formula which 

1 On the various readings and the interpretations of this passage, v. 
Zahn, Das Evangelium des Matthaus, 193. 



2i8 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

recurs in Matthew, Ye have heard that it was said, but 
I say unto you.^ The common source of Matthew 
and Luke must therefore have represented Jesus in that 
attitude which is fully illustrated in Matt. 5 ^^'^^ — the 
attitude of one conscious that in Himself the earlier 
revelation of God's will has been transcended, and a 
new and higher revelation made. It did not belong to 
Luke's purpose, writing as he did for Gentile Christians, 
whose interest in the Old Law was slight, to emphasise 
this contrast; and though it is emphasised in Matthew, 
who had in view a community brought up under the 
law as Judaism understood it, it does not originate with 
him. It is earlier than either evangelist, and undoubtedly 
goes back to Jesus Himself. Possibly He did not on any 
one occasion accumulate all the illustrations of it which 
Matthew gathers into his sermon here, but, as we shall 
see, he betrays in innumerable ways the sense of the orig- 
inality and absoluteness of the revelation which has come 
into the world in Him. It is quite common to speak of 
Jesus as a prophet, and so even disciples spoke of Him 
from the first (Luke 24^^), but in truth there can be no 
greater contrast than that of the prophetic consciousness, 
as we can discern it from the Old Testament, and the con- 
sciousness of Jesus as it is revealed in the Sermon on the 
Mount. There is not in the Old Testament the remotest 
analogy to such words as. Ye have heard that it was said to 
them of old time, but I say unto you. The sovereign legis- 
lative authority which breathes throughout the Sermon on 
the Mount stands absolutely alone in Scripture. It is the 
more remarkable, when we consider the profound rever- 
ence which Jesus had for the earlier revelation, that He 
moves in this perfect freedom and independence in presence 
of it. If any one says that it is the evangelist to whom 

^ See B. Weiss, Das Matthdusevangeliuni u. seine Lucas-parallelen, 
170, 174. 



THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 219 

this representation is due — that it is he who pictures 
Jesus as legislating in this tone of sovereignty and finality 
— and that we cannot reason from His recurrent formula, 
Ye have heard, but I say unto you, to the mind of Jesus 
Himself, we are entitled to ask for the ground of such 
an assertion. Even if we granted that the recurrent for- 
mula of the evangelist did not reproduce the ipsissima 
verba of Jesus, we should be entitled to say that it con- 
densed the impression which the teaching and the attitude 
of Jesus made on some one in immediate contact with Him; 
and such an impression is part of the word of the Lord, 
whether it is given in words which He Himself used or 
not. But it is only if we insulate the report of the Sermon, 
and approach it with the presupposition that the Speaker 
cannot be any more, essentially, than one of His hearers 
— cannot have a relation to God or truth or the King- 
dom essentially different from theirs — that we have any 
motive for questioning the evangelist's representation. 
We have only to recall the fact that behind the new 
Law stands the Person to whom we have been intro- 
duced in the baptism, the Person who in the beatitudes 
and in the charge to the Twelve claims and assumes 
that He will find an absolute devotion on the part of 
men, to feel that the formula of the evangelist is the 
congruous and natural expression of Jesus' consciousness 
of Himself. If He said other things about which no 
question could reasonably be raised — if He said what 
we read in Matt. 5 ", Matt. 10 ^2- 33. 37 — ^-j^g^j there is not 
the slightest reason to suppose that He could not have 
spoken of Himself as He does throughout the legislative 
part of the Sermon; and there is the authority not only 
of Matthew, but of the older evangelic source common 
to Matthew and Luke, for believing that He did so speak. 
So far from the representation in the evangelist being 
historically incredible, it fails in with all that is most 



220 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

surely known of Jesus' sense of what He was; it belongs 
to the completeness and concrete reality of the testimony 
concerning Him, that when He spoke of the new law of 
life for His disciples He should speak not otherwise but 
with the deliberate sovereign authority which is again and 
again exhibited here. 

No mention has yet been made of the words with 
which the sermon proper, and the relation of Jesus to 
the new law and the old, are introduced in Matthew: 
Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: 
I did not come to destroy but to fulfil. There is no 
exact parallel to this saying elsewhere in the gospels, 
though if we may judge from many examples Jesus was 
in the habit of reflecting on His mission, and giving 
expression to His reflections, in this form. For instance, 
/ came not to call the righteous, but sinners (Matt. 9 ^^) ; 
I came not to send peace but a sword (Matt. 10 ^^ ^•) ; The 
Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to min- 
ister (Matt. 20 2^); / came to cast fire upon the earth 
(Luke 12 ^^); The Son of Man cams to seek and to save 
that which was lost (Luke 19"). Several of these in- 
stances are found also in Mark, and the same formula 
occurs with characteristic variations in John: / came 
that they might have life (10 ^*') ; / came not to judge the 
world (12 ^^); for this cause have I come into the world 
that I might bear witness to the truth (18"). The re- 
currence of this mode of thought and expression in all 
the gospels is most easily understood on the assumption 
that it goes back to Jesus Himself; it was so character- 
istic of Him to think and speak of the purpose of His 
mission — He was so distinctly an object of thought to 
Himself — that no one could report Him truly who did 
not report this. Hence the much-discussed saying of 
Matthew 5 *^ is in all probability genuine. That as an 
expression of the real attitude and the actual achievement 



THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 221 

of Jesus it is both true and felicitous, there is no reason to 
deny, and it is not easy to see why it should be ascribed 
not to Him, but to another reflecting on His significance. 
We have seen much reason to believe that no one reflected 
so profoundly on His significance as He did Himself, and 
the very fact that one subject of reflection was His re- 
lation to the ancient revelation, alike in law and in proph- 
ecy, proves how singular His consciousness of Himself 
must have been. Think it out as we may, it was Jesus' 
consciousness of Himself that all that God had initiated in 
the earlier dispensation of requirement and promise was 
to be consummated in Him; and that puts Him into a 
solitary and incomparable place. That is the place which 
He holds in the faith of the primitive Church, but He 
does not owe it to that faith. It is the place which through- 
out His life He assumes as His own; He only accepts it 
from the believing Church because He has all along made 
it apparent that it is His due. It is not necessary for our 
purpose to go into detail about the relation of Jesus to 
the Law; ^ and His consciousness of Himself in relation to 
prophecy, or to the purpose of God as adumbrated and 
initiated in the Old Testament, will come up better in 
another connexion. 

(3) The third point in the Sermon on the Mount at 
which the self-consciousness of Jesus is opened to us is 
that in which He is represented as the final Judge of 
men. Here there is some difficulty in determining what 
precisely Jesus said. In both Matthew and Luke, what 
immediately precedes the close of the Sermon is the 
passage on the trees which bear good and bad fruit. It 
is by their fruit they are known, and Matthew prepares 
for what is to follow by inserting verse 19: Every tree 
that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast 
into the fire. This has nothing corresponding to it in 

^ See article * Law in the New Testament' in Hastings' Bible Dictionary. 



222 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

Luke, who introduces at this point a saying found much 
later in Matt. (12^^), carrying on the idea that as trees 
are to be known by their fruit, so men also have un- 
mistakable ways of showing what they are. But after 
this little divergence the two evangelists run parallel 
again. The difficulty is, that though the parallelism is 
unmistakable it is far from close, and that the elements 
of it have to be brought together from different quarters 
in Luke. The passage is so important that it is worth 
while to go into some detail. In Matt. 7 ^^"^^ we read: 
'Not every one who says to Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter 
into the kingdom of heaven, but he who doeth the will 
of My Father who is in heaven. Many shall say to Me 
in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Thy 
name, and in Thy name cast out devils, and in Thy 
name done many mighty works? And then shall I 
openly declare unto them, I never knew you: depart 
from Me, ye that work lawlessness.' In Luke's ac- 
count of the Sermon only the first sentence of this has an 
echo at the corresponding place (6 ^^) : ' And why do 
you call Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which 
I say?' The formula Lord, Lord, the occurrence of 
the saying at this precise point, and the use to which 
it is put, are a strong argument that some equivalent of 
it stood here in the source common to Matthew and Luke. 
It is not apparent, however, that this equivalent, which 
according to Harnack ^ was probably more remote from 
Matthew and Luke than the source they ordinarily used 
in common, made any reference to the last judgment. Such 
a reference, nevertheless, which is introduced by Matthew 
here, is found further on in Luke in parabolic form 
(13 2®^-). The parable deals with persons who to their 
own astonishment find themselves at last excluded from 
the Kingdom — the same class of person in view in Matt. 

^ Spriiche u. Reden Jesu, 52. 



THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 223 

^ 22 f . ( Then shall ye begin to say, We did eat and drink 
in Thy presence, and Thou didst teach in our streets. 
And He shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are: 
depart from Me, all ye workers of unrighteousness.' 
It is usually argued that in comparison with Matt. 7 ^^ ^ • 
this must be the more accurate version of Jesus' words. 
He is speaking to His contemporaries, and when He is 
represented — for He is of course the oixode^TTdr-^^ of the 
parable — as saying to them at last, I do not know you 
(Luke 13^^), it is easy to imagine their astonished re- 
monstrance: 'Not know us! Why, we ate and drank 
with you, and it was in our streets you taught.' In 
comparison with this, Matthew's version reads much 
more like a preacher's application of the words of Jesus 
in the apostolic age, and with its experiences in view, 
than like a precise report of what Jesus said. There 
was no such thing as prophesying in the name of Jesus 
till after Pentecost, and the words which Matthew puts 
into the lips of Jesus would not have been intelligible to 
any one when the Sermon on the Mount was spoken. 
No one then had seen or could anticipate prophesying, 
casting out devils, and working miracles, by the name 
of Jesus. But while this is so, the application which 
the evangelist makes to his contemporaries in the apos- 
tolic church — as though Jesus were speaking to theniy 
and not to His own contemporaries in His lifetime — 
of the words which Jesus actually used, is quite legitimate; 
it does not in the least misrepresent the mind of Jesus. 
In Matthew and in Luke aHke — in the simpler form of 
words which is strictly appropriate to the lips of Jesus 
Himself (Luke 13 ^^ ^■), and in the more ample and rhetor- 
ical one in which the evangelist (speaking in the same 
spirit as Paul in i Cor. 13 ^'^) strives to bring home the 
moral import of them to the conscience of the next gen- 
eration — the attitude of Tesus is the same. It is His ac- 



224 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

ceptance or rejection of men on which their final destiny 
depends. It is His voice by which they are admitted to 
or excluded from the Kingdom of God. Not that this 
is done arbitrarily; the very purpose of these solemn 
utterances is to show that there is nothing arbitrary in it. 
No formal recognition of Jesus, no casual acquaintance 
with Him, can be regarded as a substitute for doing 
what He says (Luke 6 ^^) , or doing the will of His Father 
in heaven (Matt. 7 ^^). But in both gospels alike, and in a 
source which their very divergences at this point show to 
lie far behind them both, it is He who pronounces on the 
value of every human life. It is the consciousness that 
the Speaker is nothing less than the final Judge of all 
which makes the parable of the builders on the rock and 
the sand, with which the Sermon closes, the most solemn 
and overpowering of all the words of Jesus. 

The place of Christ as Judge, a place which He has 
held in Christian faith from the beginning, is often pre- 
sented in another light. It is regarded as a formal piece 
of theology, with no support in the mind of Jesus. When 
men came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, they 
attached to Him (it is said) all the traditional Messianic 
predicates, and among others this, that when He came 
in His Messianic power He would come as Judge; ^ but 
the transference of these predicates to Jesus was a purely 
formal consequence of regarding Him as the Messiah; 
it was a historical accident, due to a peculiarity of the Mes- 
sianic dogmatic; there is nothing vital in it, nothing which 
is due to Jesus Himself. There could not possibly be a 
more complete misconception or misrepresentation of the 
facts with which we have to deal in this connexion. What- 

1 How far this is true in point of fact is rather doubtful; in the Old 
Testament it is always God who is Judge, not the Messiah, and it is not 
clear that in the New Testament period the function had been transferred 
from God to His Anointed. See Bousset, Die Religion des JudentumSy 
c. xiii. 



THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT 22^ 

ever is formal in the New Testament, the belief in Jesus 
as Judge is not. It is a belief which may be clothed here 
and there in forms which Jewish theology supplied to the 
imagination, but it rests on personal experiences and on 
the sense of Jesus' attitude to men. Whatever else hap- 
pened to men in the presence of Jesus, they were judged. 
They knew they were. They had experiences which 
prompted such utterances as Luke 5 ^: Depart from me, 
for I am a sinful man, O Lord ; or John 4 ^^ : Come, see a 
man that told me all things that ever I did. Such ex- 
periences furnished them with irresistible evidence that this 
wonderful Person might be the Christ; they were not idle 
deductions from the fact that He was the Christ. It 
was impossible not to generalise them, and to realise 
that with everything else that Jesus might be to men. He 
was also their Judge. He Himself, it may be said, 
generalised them, or realised in His own mind all that 
they involved. Not to speak meanwhile of passages in 
which He tells of the coming of the Son of Man and of 
the judgment attendant upon it {e.g. Matt. 16 ^^ 25^^'*^), 
we have in the Sermon on the Mount, when every allow- 
ance has been made which historical criticism can de- 
mand, a revelation of the mind of Jesus and of His attitude 
to men, which covers all that is meant by calling Him their 
final Judge. Resting as it does on the oldest of evangelic 
records, the source which lies behind the first and third 
gospels, and at an important point very far behind them, 
this revelation brings us as close to Jesus as we can 
historically be brought. It is not the witness of apostolic 
faith to which it introduces us, but the witness of Jesus 
to Himself. It is no exaggeration to say that it may be 
summed up in the solemn words of James (4^^): One 
only is the Lawgiver and Judge, and that One He with 
whom we are confronted here. 
IS 



226 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

The Healing of the Centurion^s Servant 

(Matt. 8 s-w Luke 7 i-i", 13 28-30) 

In Luke the Sermon on the Mount is followed im- 
mediately by the account of Jesus' return to Capernaum, 
and the healing there of a centurion's servant. The 
same incident is recorded in Matt. 8 ^'^^, and comparison 
of Luke 7 ^ with Matt. 7 ^^, 8 ^, makes it more than prob- 
able that the sequence here indicated goes back to the 
common source.^ We have this early authority, therefore, 
for one of the healing miracles, and in spite of the notable 
variation of the evangelists with regard to the centurion's 
mode of approaching Jesus, there is an even more not- 
able agreement — it virtually amounts to identity — in 
their report both of the officers' words and of Jesus' reply. 
'Sir, I am not worthy that Thou shouldest come under 
my roof, but speak the word only and my boy shall be 
healed. For I also am a man under authority, having 
under myself soldiers, and I say to one Go, and he goeth; 
and to another. Come, and he cometh; and to my ser- 
vant, Do this, and he doeth it' (Matt. 8 « ^- Luke 7 « ^O. 
The centurion evidently believed that Jesus had at His 
disposal spiritual messengers who could execute His 
commands, just as he himself had soldiers and slaves, 
and that therefore His personal presence was not essen- 
tial to the carrying out of His will. We do not need 
to accept his interpretation of the way in which Jesus 
exercised His power: the point is that Jesus enthusi- 
astically welcomed and approved his attitude. 'When 
He heard, He marvelled and said to those who followed, 
Verily I say unto you, not even in Israel have I found 

1 So Harnack, Spriiche u. Reden Jesu, 54, who says it follows 'with 
certainty that great parts of the Sermon stood together in Q and were fol- 
lowed by this narrative.' Allen, Commentary on St. Matthew, p. 79, 
doubts this because of the remarkable differences between Matthew and 
Luke. 



THE CENTURION'S FAITH 227 

such faith.' We see here that Jesus wanted to find 
faith, and we see also what faith is. It is that attitude 
of the soul to Jesus which is confident that the saving 
help of God is present in Him, and that there is no 
limit to what it can do. It has become a commonplace 
to point out that whereas in the theological books of the 
New Testament Jesus Himself is the object of faith, in 
the synoptic gospels, which are truer to history, this is 
never the case. The only case in the synoptics in which 
Jesus speaks of men believing on Himself is Matt. 18^ 
(these little ones who believe on Me), and in the parallel 
passage in Mark 9^^ the decisive words 'on Me' are 
wanting. Faith in the synoptics, it is argued — that is, 
faith as it was understood and required by Jesus — is 
always faith in God. In this there is both truth and 
error. God is undoubtedly the only and the ultimate 
object of faith, but what the synoptic gospels in point of 
fact present to us on this and many other occasions is 
(to borrow the language of i Peter i ^^) the spectacle of 
men who believe in God through Him. Their faith is 
their assurance that God's saving power is there, in 
Jesus, for the relief of their needs. Such faith Jesus 
demands as the condition upon which God's help be- 
comes effective; and the more ardent and unqualified it 
is the more joyfully is it welcomed. The faith in Christ 
which is illustrated in the epistles is in essence the same 
thing. It has no doubt other needs and blessings in 
view than those which are uppermost in the synoptics, 
but as an attitude to Jesus it is identical with that which 
is there called by the same name. It will be more con- 
venient to examine this subject further when we come to 
look at the self -revelation of Jesus in Mark, for there the 
narratives of the 'mighty works' bring it to the front: 
but it seemed worth while to emphasise here, in con- 
nexion with a miracle recorded in the oldest evangelic 



228 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

source, the memorable utterance of Jesus in which He 
sets the seal of His joyous approbation on that attitude 
of the soul to Himself as the bearer of God's saving 
power in which the Christian religion has had its being 
from the first. There is no inconsistency here between 
the Christian consciousness of what Jesus is, and Jesus' 
consciousness of Himself. 

Jesus and John the Baptist 

(Matt. II 2-^^ 21 23-32, Luke 7 '^•^') 

It has already been remarked that the only one of His 
contemporaries who made a strong impression upon 
Jesus was John the Baptist. We do not know that they 
ever met except on the one occasion when Jesus was 
baptized in Jordan, but the personality, the mission, and 
the method of John were much in Jesus' mind. He not 
only thought much, He spoke repeatedly about him. 
In the last days of His life He recalled John and his 
ministry to the Jewish authorities (Mark 11 2^^-, Matt. 
2j23ff.^ Luke 20^*^), and according to the fourth gospel, 
where John is particularly prominent, He spent some of 
the last weeks of His life in the scenes of the Baptist's 
early ministry (John 10^^). On different occasions He 
expressly compared or contrasted John with Himself, 
and in doing so revealed with peculiar vividness His 
sense of what He Himself was, and of the relation in 
which He stood to the whole work of God, past and to 
come. It is fortunate that the record of this has been 
preserved for the most part in the common source of 
Matthew and Luke (Matt. 11 ^-i^, Luke 7^*"^), and to 
this we shall confine ourselves here. 

There is a certain amount of difference in the his- 
torical introduction to the words of Jesus, but both 
evangelists tell of a message sent by the Baptist, and 
both give his question to Jesus in precisely the same 



JESUS AND THE BAPTIST 229 

terms: 'Art Thou the Coming One, or must we look for 
another?' The message was sent because John had 
heard in his prison — according to Luke through his own 
disciples — of wonderful works wrought by Jesus. For 
the evangelists, these works identified Jesus as the 
promised Messiah: Matthew calls them expressly (ch. 
11^) 'the works of the Christ.' John's attitude, how- 
ever, is doubtful. It has become almost a tradition in a 
certain school of criticism that what we have here is the 
dawning in John's mind for the first time of the idea that 
Jesus might be the Messiah; and he is supposed to send 
to Jesus that this nascent idea may be confirmed or 
corrected. The inference, of course, would be that the 
story of the baptism — unless John were completely ex- 
cluded from all knowledge of what it involved — is false; 
nothing happened at that early date to make John look 
for anything remarkable from Jesus. But it is gratui- 
tous to set aside the gospel tradition on such dubious 
grounds. John's state of mind is surely not hard to 
understand, even if the tradition be maintained. What 
ever his hopes or expectations of Jesus may have been, 
they were religious hopes, not mathematical certainties; 
they belonged to faith, and faith may always be tried 
and shaken. John had had much to shake his faith. 
The Messiah in whom be believed was one who was 
pre-eminently the Judge: when He came, it was to 
punish the wicked, and especially to right the wronged. 
Could Jesus be the Coming One when a man like John 
lay in Herod's dungeon for no other reason than that he 
had been faithful to the right ? If Jesus were indeed the 
Messiah, would it not be the very first demonstration of 
His Messiahship He gave, that He would come and 
avenge upon Herod the wrongs of the just and holy man 
who had prepared His way? It is not the voice of 
dawning faith, but the appeal of disappointment ready to 



230 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

break down into despair that is heard in John's question. 
And that this is so is confirmed by the significant words 
with which the direct answer of Jesus closes: Blessed is 
he whosoever shall not be offended in Me. This answer 
undoubtedly has in it a note of warning. But a note of 
warning is only appropriate on the evangelic, not on the 
so-called critical, view of the situation. Jesus would not 
snub nascent faith by unprovoked severity, but it was 
necessary for Him to warn even one whose services to 
God had been so distinguished as John's against stum- 
bling at the divine as it was represented by Himself. 
The gospels do not speak of any one as being offended 
in Jesus unless He has first felt His attraction. It is 
people who are conscious of something in Jesus which 
appeals to them, and who go with Him a certain length, 
but then encounter something in Him which they cannot 
get over, who are represented as 'offended.' The warn- 
ing involved in the beatitude is appropriate only to a 
person thus affected or in danger of being thus affected 
to Jesus; in other words, it is appropriate to John as a 
person who had once had hopes of Jesus which his own 
unfortunate experiences, in spite of all he heard, were 
making it difficult for him to sustain. It is gratuitous, 
therefore, to say that the narrative invalidates that of the 
baptism, and on any theory whatever of the spiritual 
history of John it throws a welcome light on Jesus' mind 
about Himself. 

The following points in it call for special notice. First, 
there is the reference of Jesus to His works. 'Go and 
tell John the things ye see and hear : the blind receive 
their sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed 
and the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have 
the gospel preached to them.' The evangelists, no one 
doubts, understood this literally, but it is another critical 
tradition that it must be taken figuratively. Perhaps it 



JESUS AND THE BAPTIST 231 

should be taken both ways, but it is to be taken literally 
at least. In Matt. 11 ^^'^^, which with its parallel in Luke 
10 *^ ^- goes back to the source we are at present depend- 
ing on, Jesus speaks twice of his duvdfist? or mighty 
works, and it is impossible to question that these are 
what we usually speak of as His miracles. Jesus ap- 
pealed to His wonderful works, crowned as they were 
by the preaching of glad tidings to the poor, to identify 
Him as the Coming One. They were not, perhaps, 
what John expected, whose imagination was filled with 
the axe and the fan; but they were the true insignia of the 
Messiah. It is with the sense of their worth that Jesus 
adds. And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended 
in Me. This sentence may be easily passed by, but 
there is not a word in the gospel which reveals more 
clearly the solitary place of Jesus. It stands on the 
same plane with those wonderful utterances already 
considered in which He speaks of confessing and deny- 
ing Him before men, of hating father and mother, son 
and daughter for His sake. Unemphatic as it may 
appear, it makes the blessedness of men depend upon 
a right relation to Himself; happy, with the rare and 
high happiness on which God congratulates man, is he 
who is not at fault about Jesus, but takes Him for all 
that in His own consciousness He is. That Jesus in 
this informal utterance claims to be the Christ is un- 
questionable; or if 'claims' is an aggressive word, we can 
only correct it by saying that He speaks as the Christ. 
That is the character which He bears in His own mind, 
and in the consciousness of which He declares Himself. 
He is 6 ip^ofievory and He is there, the bearer of God's 
redeeming love, the Person through whom the purpose 
of God is to be achieved and His promises fulfilled. We 
do not need to raise any such technical question as, What 
precisely is meant by calling Jesus the Christ? It is 



232 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

not by studying Messianic dogmatic that we learn to 
understand the gospels, it is in the words and deeds of 
Jesus that we find the material for filling with their 
proper meaning this and all other titles which are ap- 
plied to Him. But taking this simple sentence in its 
simplicity we do not hesitate to say of it, as of Matt. 
10^^, that there is nothing in the fourth gospel which 
transcends it. The attitude which it so calmly and sove- 
reignly assumes to men, the attitude which it as calmly 
and sovereignly demands from men — even from men so 
great as John the Baptist — is precisely the attitude of 
Christians to their Lord in the most 'Christian' parts 
of the New Testament. It is not they who gratuitously, 
and under mistaken ideas of what He is, put Him into a 
place which no human being ought to give to another; 
but He Himself from the very beginning spontaneously 
assumes this place as His. The Christian faith in 
Christ, which the New Testament exhibits throughout, 
would be justified by this one word even if it stood alone. 
But it does not stand alone even in this passage. The 
word of warning spoken by Jesus might have seemed to 
those who heard it to reflect upon the character of the 
Baptist, but the moment the messengers are gone Jesus 
breaks into a striking panegyric upon John.* He is not 
a reed shaken with the wind — a weak and inconstant 
nature. He is not clothed in soft raiment, with a silken 
tunic under his camel's hair — a man making his own 
privately out of a pretended divine mission. He is a 
prophet, yes, and far more than a prophet. The prophets 
had their place in the carrying out of God's gracious 
purpose towards men, but this man's place excelled 
theirs. Both Matthew and Luke, and no doubt therefore 
their source, explain this by applying to John the pro- 

» It may be that all that is here reported does not belong to the present 
or to any one occasion, but this is immaterial. 



JESUS AND THE BAPTIST 233 

phecy of Malachi (3 *) : ' Behold I send my messenger 
before thy face who shall prepare thy way before thee.^ 
It must be admitted that it is very difficult to suppose 
that these are the words of Jesus. In the Old Testa- 
ment it is Israel which is addressed, and God speaks 
throughout in the first person: 'Behold I send My 
messenger, and he shall prepare the way before Me; and 
the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to His 
temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye 
desire, behold, he cometh, saith Jehovah of hosts.' The 
Septuagint variations do not affect the character of 
the passage in this respect. But in the New Testa- 
ment, both here and in Mark i ^, it is not Israel which is 
addressed, but the Messiah (notice the change of before 
Me into before thee); and the messenger prepares the 
way for the Messiah, not, as in Malachi, for God. It 
may be, as Zahn argues,^ that the disciples would never 
have ventured on this modification of the prophecy un- 
less Jesus had applied to Himself what is said of the 
earnestly expected Lord, the Mediator of the Covenant, 
in Malachi, but of this we cannot be sure. What is 
indubitable is the solemn asseveration of Jesus which 
follows: 'There hath not arisen among them that are 
born of women a greater than John the Baptist, but 
he that is least in the Kingdom of God is greater than 
he.' It does not matter whether the greatness of John 
is conceived as that of official dignity or that of personal 
character; he had both. He had an incomparably high 
vocation as the immediate messenger of the Kingdom, 
and his personality was equal to it. What does matter 
is that there is a still higher greatness than John's which 
belongs even to the least in the Kingdom. It is im- 
possible to suppose that Jesus here thinks of the King- 
dom as purely transcendent, and means that whoever 

1 Commentary on Matthew, ad loc. 



234 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

finds an inheritance in it when it comes — all its future 
citizens — will stand on a higher plane than John. The 
fiixporepog, of whom he speaks in the passage, is only 
the most typical example of the fiupoi, or little ones, to 
whom he refers so often. Taking them as a body, 
the citizens of the Kingdom as Jesus knows them are 
insignificant people — 'these httle ones,' or 'these little 
ones who believe'; but the cause with which they are 
identified makes them partakers in its incomparable 
greatness. He asserts this in all kinds of indirect ways. 
The smallest service done to them is registered and 
repaid: Whosoever shall give to drink to one of these 
little ones a cup of cold water only, in the name of a 
disciple, verily I say unto you, He shall in no wise lose 
his reward (Matt. lo*^). The most terrible indig- 
nation flames out against those who lead them astray: 
Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which 
believe (on Me), it were better for him that a great mill- 
stone were hanged about his neck, and that he were 
drowned in the depth of the sea (Matt. i8^). The most 
wonderful privileges are asserted for them: Take heed 
that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto 
you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the 
face of My Father which is in heaven — that is, they have 
immediate and unimpeded access to plead their cause 
with the Highest. The greatness of the little ones is 
a familiar thought with Jesus, illustrated in these and 
other ways, and it is only put with startling boldness 
when He declares that the most insignificant of them all is 
greater than John. But the only difference was that for 
the little ones Jesus and the Kingdom were realities 
which interpenetrated; all their hopes of the Kingdom 
were hopes to be realised through Him; whereas John, 
when this word was spoken, stood looking toward Jesus 
indeed, but with a look critical and perplexed. No one 



JESUS AND THE BAPTIST 235 

who takes this attitude to Jesus knows or can know the 
supreme good which God bestows upon man; whatever 
his eminence in other respects — in ability, in public 
service, in native capacity for the spiritual life — the 
most insignificant disciple of Jesus stands on a higher 
plane. There is no formal 'claim' made here, but there 
is the revelation, on the part of Jesus, of a consciousness 
in relation to God and humanity in which He stands 
absolutely alone. 

The same consciousness is implied also in the difficult 
saying which follows immediately in Matthew (11 ^2^), 
and which Luke gives in a considerably different form in 
another connexion (16^^). The difficulties hardly con- 
cern us here, and, fortunately, the one point which is 
perfectly clear is that which does concern us, namely, 
the consciousness of Jesus that with the ministry of John 
a new religious era had dawned. Up till now it had 
been the reign of the law and the prophets, an age of 
preparation and expectation, during which men could 
live the life of obedient routine, and wait for God to 
fulfil the hopes He had inspired. But with the appear- 
ance of John that more tranquil age had come to an end; 
men lived and they knew it, at a religious crisis; a situa- 
tion had emerged which called for instant and decisive 
action. It is within this situation we have to inter- 
pret the difficult words ^ ^aaiUia Twv obpa\>(bv jSid^szat xai 

i^taffzai dp7rd!^ou(Tiv aurvjv; but whether they mean that 
the Kingdom comes in like a whirlwind, and that violent 
men like the Zealots wish to bring it in so; or that at 
any cost of violence to themselves genuine disciples 
make good their share in it; or that it is invaded by 
aggressive publicans and sinners who (as decent people 
think) have no right to be there, is irrelevant to our pur- 
pose. What it concerns us to note is simply Jesus' 
consciousness of the new age. It dates from John, but 



236 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

it is not identified with him. John, if their contempo- 
raries will only believe it, is the promised Elijah, who is to 
precede the end (Mai. 4^ Matt, ii ^*). Who can Jesus 
be, when no one less than Elijah must come to prepare 
His way ? 

The passage in which Matthew (ii ^^^■) and Luke (7^^^) 
record the verdict of Jesus on His contemporaries — a 
passage in which Jesus deliberately contrasts Himself and 
His forerunner — is reserved till we come to consider the 
title Son of Man, which occurs in both writers at this 
point: meanwhile we proceed to examine what is in 
some ways a critically important section in the gospels, 
Matt. II 25-27 with the parallel in Luke 10 21-22. 

The Great Thanksgiving of Jesus 

(Matt. II 25-27^ Luke lo 21 «•) 

This passage is not found in the same connexion in 
the two evangelists, but there is no doubt that it stood 
in the source common to both. Luke attaches it to the 
return of the Seventy, and to their report of their success. 
'In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit.' To 
Luke it is an utterance of pure joy — ' uncompounded 
emotion.' It may be questioned whether this does justice 
to the words of Jesus. There is something more subtle 
in the placing of the words by Matthew, who also intro- 
duces them by 'at that time.' The time in Matthew 
is that at which Jesus has been sending His warning 
beatitude to John, passing a scornful censure on the 
childishness of his contemporaries in their dealings with 
God and His messengers, and pronouncing woes on the 
Galilaean cities which had seen His mighty works and 
not repented. 'At that time Jesus answered and said, I 
thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that 
Thou didst hide these things from the wise and under- 



THE GREAT THANKSGIVING 237 

standing, and didst reveal them unto babes. Yea, 
Father, for so it was well pleasing in Thy sight.' The 
eleventh chapter of Matthew as a whole might be headed 
GxdvbaXovj Offence: it is engaged throughout with peo- 
ple who found things in Jesus which they could not 
get over, and therefore with the disappointing side of 
His experience. It is a question of profound interest, 
how Jesus Himself regarded such disappointments, and 
the evangelist finds the answer to it in the first part 
of the great thanksgiving. When Jesus reflects on His 
work and its issues, disenchanting in some respects as 
they are, what is uppermost in His mind is recognition 
of God's fatherly providence, and unreserved and joyful 
surrender to it. The words 'revealed' and 'hidden' 
show that He is thinking mainly of His teaching. It is 
only the peculiarity of an Eastern language that makes 
Him seem to give thanks that some have rejected it: in 
our idiom He would have said, 'That while Thou hast 
hidden these things from the wise and understanding. 
Thou hast revealed them unto babes.' Jesus could not 
have rejoiced in a revelation which was only accessible 
to the wise and understanding; this would have excluded 
the babes. But a revelation accessible to the babes is 
accessible to all; even the wise and understanding may 
apprehend it if they are willing to lay aside their pre- 
tensions and become as little children. Jesus is content, 
and more than content, to have it so. He acquiesces 
with joy in the ordering of His life and work upon such 
lines. It is the gracious will of the Father, the Sove- 
reign Lord of heaven and earth; what should one who calls 
God Father do but accept it with serene confidence ? 

If the words of Jesus stopped here, we might not be 
able to bring them into any precise relation to our subject. 
They are such words as any child of God might use who 
encountered untoward experiences in doing the will of 



238 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

his Father. But Jesus goes much further. The God- 
ward k^ofioXoyqfft's OX thanksgiving, the joyful acqui- 
escence in the Father's will, is followed by a manward 
expression of assurance. The results of His work so 
far may seem disconcerting, but they do not cast Him 
down. He has an inward confidence that He is com- 
petent for the work the Father has given Him to do, 
and that He alone is competent. This is what is repre- 
sented in the words of Matthew (ii ^'): All things have 
been delivered unto Me of My Father: and no one 
knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any 
know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever 
the Son willeth to reveal Him. The variations in Luke 
are immaterial, and before referring to what many regard 
as an earlier tradition of this saying, substantially differ- 
ent in import, it will be worth while to consider what 
the received text means. The following points are to 
be noticed. 

First, the declaration 'all things have been delivered 
unto me by My Father ' is to be interpreted in relation to 
the context. 'All things' does not refer to universal 
sovereignty, as when Jesus after the resurrection says, 
All power has been given unto Me in heaven and on 
earth (Matt. 28*^). This is not relevant here, nor is 
there any analogy to it till Jesus is glorified. Neither 
does it express, as has been suggested, the Christian 
confidence declared in Paul's words, ' All things are yours ' 
(i Cor. 3 ^^), or, 'We know that all things work together 
for good to them that love God' (Rom. 8^^). Standing 
where it does, 'all things' must mean all that is involved 
in the revelation of God to man — the whole contents 
and administration of this revelation. This is what is in 
view both in what precedes and in what follows. In the 
work of making Himself known to men, the Father has 
no organ but Jesus, and in Jesus He has an adequate 



THE GREAT THANKSGIVING 239 

organ. The word Trapedodr] is supposed by many — 
Wellhausen among the latest — to allude to -rrapadofft?, or 
tradition, all religious knowledge among the Jews com- 
ing under this description. The tradition of the Jewish 
schools, on which the wise and understanding leaned 
so confidently, Jesus brushed aside; the tradition which 
He Himself represented was immediately due to God. 
It is plausible rather than convincing to deduce so much 
from the term TzapsdodTjy but discounting the possi- 
ble associations of the word, two things are clear. One 
is that Jesus strongly asserts here, as He is often rep- 
resented doing in the fourth gospel, His subordination 
to the Father. He has nothing that He has not re- 
ceived. His doctrine is not His own, but His who sent 
Him. The other is that there is no limit to what He 
has received. The Father loves the Son and shows Him 
all things that He Himself is doing (John 5 ^^). 

The second point that calls for notice is the correla- 
tion of the Father and the Son. Both the words are 
used absolutely: as there is only one Person who can be 
called the Father, so there is only one who can be called 
the Son. The same phenomenon recurs in Mark 13 ^^ : 
But of that day or hour knoweth no one, not even the 
angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. It is 
surely remarkable to find the credibility of this disputed. 
Schmiedel, indeed, whose treatment of the words before 
us will be considered presently, makes the passage in 
Mark one of the five foundation pillars for a purely 
historical account of Jesus, but Loisy is embarrassed by 
both.^ * Although Father and Son,' he writes, 'are not 
exclusively metaphysical terms' — in which case it would 
have been easy to discard them — 'and although they 
here represent God and Christ, the use of the word Son 
simpliciter is extraordinary in the mouth of Jesus; it 

1 Les Evangiles Synoptiques, i. 909. 



240 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

belongs to the language of tradition, not to that of the 
Saviour; the Christ it designates is immortal, we may 
even say eternal.' He refers in a note to the fact that 
the same use of Son is found again in Mark, but adds, 
'there also one may think of a gloss of tradition, or of 
the evangelist.' Thought is free, and one may think of 
anything he likes, but surely it is arbitrary in the highest 
degree to set aside the testimony of our two oldest 
sources to what they evidently regarded as peculiarly 
solemn and important utterances of Jesus on the ground 
that the language they use belongs to tradition, not to 
the Saviour. What do we know of tradition, how can 
we form any idea at all of its language, except on the 
basis of the evidence which is here summarily set aside? 
Of course if one has made up his mind beforehand that 
no sane and pious person could ever speak of God and 
Himself as the Father and the Son, and that therefore 
such language could not have been used by Jesus, his 
way is clear; but it is clear also that he is measuring 
Jesus, and Jesus' consciousness of God and Himself, by 
antecedent convictions about men in general, and not by 
the evidence in our hands regarding this wonderful Man. 
If we knew nothing whatever about Jesus apart from 
this utterance it might well seem staggering, but we 
cannot forget as we read it all that we have already 
passed in review. The mind of Jesus on His own re- 
lations to God and to humanity is not, as we have seen 
abundant reason to believe, to be judged by that of 
other men; there is in it not only something which iden- 
tifies Him with us, but something also, coming out 
in innumerable ways, which profoundly differentiates 
Him from us; and that mysterious something is con- 
spicuous here. To sum up the whole passage. Matt, 
xi. ^^'^^, as Loisy does * — Cantique de sagesse chretienne, 

» Ut supra, p. 910. 



THE GREAT THANKSGIVING 241 

fruit de VEsprit — is to shut one's eyes to the Jesus who 
is visible throughout the gospels because one's mind 
is full of another Jesus who cannot be discovered in 
the gospels at all. 

This unqualified correlation of the Father and the 
Son is the ultimate ground on which Jesus holds the 
place which He does in New Testament faith, and un- 
less we can set aside the words in which He expresses 
it we must acknowledge that that place is justified. It 
is not only given, it is assumed. It answers to His own, 
as well as to the Christian, sense of what is due to Jesus: 
the Person on whom Christianity depends is in his own 
consciousness adequate to the responsibility. 

Finally, however, this is brought out with new em- 
phasis in the words which follow: 'No one knoweth 
the Son save the Father; neither doth any know the 
Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son 
willeth to reveal Him.' What stands on the very sur- 
face here is the mutual, perfect, and exclusive know- 
ledge of the Father and the Son. When Jesus says 
that no one knows the Son but the Father, we cannot 
suppose Him to be merely saying of Himself what is 
true of every one, that there is a mystery in individ- 
uality which is open to God alone; assuming that He 
spoke the words at all, they are relevant and consist- 
ent with the context only if they suggest a unique and 
unfathomable greatness in Jesus. It is easier to see 
the point of what comes after: Neither doth any know 
the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the 
Son wiUeth to reveal Him. Jesus declares explicitly 
that He alone knows God as Father, and that for that 
knowledge, on which blessedness depends, all men must 
become debtors to Him. It is through Him alone, and 
in accordance with His sovereign and gracious will, that 
the Father is revealed, and that men can be enlightened 
16 



242 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

and saved. It is possible to read the passage as it stands 
in too abstract and metaphysical a sense — to forget 
that Father and Son, even when used thus absolutely, 
are terms full of ethical import; but it is a mistake to 
suppose that we do justice to an utterance so striking 
when we have reduced it to moral commonplace. No 
doubt we may say with Loisy, that no one fully knows 
the Son and the devotion that binds Him to man's re- 
demption, except the Father who sends Him; and that 
no one knows the Father and the indulgent goodness 
with which He follows His creatures, except the Son 
and those who have been taught by Him; but as he 
himself allows (though he makes it an argument that 
it is not really Jesus who speaks), the terms Father 
and Son, in absolute correlation, as here, suggest some- 
thing more. The sentence as a whole tells us plainly 
that Jesus is both to God and to man what no other can 
be: He is the Son who alone knows the Father — to 
borrow the expression of the fourth gospel. He is the 
old? o^joyevrjq — and He is the Mediator through whom 
alone the knowledge of the Father comes to men. There 
is nothing in the New Testament which carries us fur- 
ther than this, and nothing more is wanted to justify 
completely the attitude of Christian faith to Jesus. It 
is a signal instance of a question-begging term when 
Loisy says that the passage translates the faith of the 
Christian community. It corresponds to it, yet does not 
translate it. But for words like these, and the reality 
which stands behind them, the faith of the Christian 
community could never have come into being, or been 
able to justify itself to its own judgment. 

Criticism of this passage has seldom gone to the ex- 
treme represented by Loisy, who refuses to allow that 
it has any historical connexion with Jesus whatever. 
But in recent times an attempt has been made to dis- 



THE GREAT THANKSGIVING 243 

count its importance by literary as opposed to historical 
considerations. It was apparently current in the sec- 
ond century in a somewhat different form. On the one 
hand, the present tense (iTrtytydxrxsc) was replaced by 
the aorist {eyvw); and on the other, the order of the 
clauses was reversed. It might then be rendered: No 
one has come to know the Father but the Son, nor has 
any one come to know the Son but the Father, and they 
(or he) to whomsoever the Son has made (or, willeth 
to make) the revelation.* The doctrinal importance 
of these changes is supposed to be very great, and has 
been strongly urged, for example, by Schmiedel.^ The 
change of tense is alleged to bring the whole utterance 
down from the timeless or eternal into the historical 
world, and the affinity of this passage with the fourth 
gospel disappears. At the time at which Jesus speaks, 
He has attained to the knowledge that God is not a 
Lord inaccessible to men and always in a heat about 
His honour, but a loving Father. But Jesus is the 
only person who has yet attained to this insight. Hav- 
ing it, it is natural for Him to think of Himself as God's 
Son, and so He does think of Himself; but none of His 
hearers has penetrated His secret. God alone knows, 
or rather has perceived — because the spiritual history 
of Jesus has given Him the opportunity of perceiving 

1 This is the 'Western' reading as given e.g. in Huck's Synapse on the 
basis of Marcion, Justin, and the Clementine HomiHes: ovSkl^ eyvo rbv 
narepa, el firj 6 vide, Kat, [ovSe) rbv vlbv el fi?) 6 Trarijp koL o\g (cj) av 6 vlbg 
airoKalvijjri {^ovlrjTaL a-KOKa/cv-ipai). Harnack in his attempted restoration of 
Q {Spriiche u. Reden Jesu, 94, 189 ff .) adopts the change of tense, but not 
that of order. He is incHned to agree with Wellhausen that the clause ' no 
one knows the Son but the Father ' is an old interpolation : the variation 
of position itself makes it suspicious, and as we have seen above its rele- 
vance is not so obvious. Harnack' s text runs: Tvavra fioi irapeddd^ vko tov 
TTaTpog^ Kol ovSelg eyvio [rbv vlbv el fir/ 6 Traryp ovde] rbv Trarepa [rig eyvo] 
el fiTj 6 vlbgKai (j edv ^ovTiTjrai 6 vlbg aTTOKalv^pai. For Weiss's view, which 
is more favourable to the received text, v. Die Quellen der synopt. Ueberl. 

30- 

2 Das vierte Evangelium, 48 ff. 



244 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

— that Jesus' attitude to Him is that of son to father. 
The change of order, too, is important. In the re- 
ceived text, what immediately precedes the last clause 
is the assertion that no one knows the Father but the 
Son, and when it is added, 'and he to whomsoever the 
Son willeth to reveal,' the object naturally supplied 
is 'the Father,' or 'the true nature of God.' But in 
the more ancient text, what immediately precedes the 
last clause is. No one knows the Son but the Father, 
and to this the natural supplement can only be, 'and 
they (or he) to whom the Son reveals Himself.' It is as 
if Jesus had said to His hearers, 'None of you has yet 
recognised me: I have to tell you Myself what I am.' 
It is not the Father whom He reveals, but the Son. 

The importance of this, allowing to the 'Western' 
text any authority it can legitimately claim, is much 
more apparent than real. To refer first to the difference 
of order: it is certain that every one who often quotes 
this utterance of Jesus quotes it with the clauses some- 
times in one order, sometimes in the other. Irenaeus, 
who censures those who adopt the 'Western' order as 
people who want to be wiser than the apostles, some- 
times follows it himself; which proves, not that it stood 
in his New Testament, but that, like other people in 
ancient and modern times, Irenaeus could recall the 
passage without attaching any significance to the order.^ 
Then as to the tense: is it quite certain that there is the 
difference which Schmiedel supposes between the aorist 
and the present? Even those who read k'yvio in their 
text must have felt that it included a present — a his- 
torical if not a timeless one; at the moment at which 
the words were spoken Jesus and the Father had the 
peculiar, mutual, and exclusive knowledge of each other 
which is asserted also in the received text. If this is so, 

^ Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., iv. 6. 2. 



THE GREAT THANKSGIVING 245 

nothing is gained for Schmiedel's interpretation by 
saying that what Jesus revealed was not the Father but 
Himself. He Himself was Son, and as the knowledge 
of relatives is one, to reveal Himself is to reveal the 
Father. It is difficult to understand why a writer who 
not only accepts as certain, but presents as the very 
type of certainty, the passage in Mark 13 ^^ in which 
there is an absolute correlation of the Father and the 
Son, should so strenuously object to it here, and argue 
that Jesus cannot have called Himself Son of God in a 
sense applicable to Himself alone. If He did it there, 
why not here? To avoid all misunderstanding, Schmie- 
del says, we must state as the import of the passage not 
that Jesus was conscious of Himself as the Son of God, 
but that He was conscious of Himself as a child of God. 
That is, we must decline the only expression which is 
known to the New Testament, and adopt an expression 
of which the New Testament does not furnish a single 
example. We must set the whole of the evidence aside, 
and construct the consciousness of Jesus out of our own 
heads. It is impossible to regard this as serious criticism. 
There is one consideration which of itself is conclusive 
against aU minimising constructions of this passage. It 
is contained in the words, All things have been delivered 
unto Me by My Father. (Harnack thinks the original 
was * by the Father ' ; but it makes no difference.) These 
words are surely not the preface to such a rational- 
istic commonplace as Schmiedel evolves from what 
comes after; they imply in Jesus a consciousness of 
His place and vocation to which nothing but the Chris- 
tian attitude to Him does justice. It is vain to isolate 
words like these about the Father and the Son, and 
then to torture them into agreement with some pre- 
conceived idea of what Jesus must have been: they 
do not stand alone in our evidence, and when we take 



246 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

them with utterances of Jesus such as have been al- 
ready examined they refuse to accept any but the highest 
interpretation. There may be theories of man and 
the universe which have antecedent antipathies to them; 
but it is no objection to them, in the eyes of a student 
of history, that they furnish a historical justification 
for the Christian faith in Jesus. It may not be amiss, 
however, to remark that while we accept this justi- 
fication, we admit that it is idle to ask whether the Son- 
ship of Jesus here spoken of is Messianic or ethical 
or metaphysical. We gain nothing by separating in 
thought what cannot be separated in reality. That 
Jesus was conscious of a unique vocation in connexion 
with God's Kingdom is true: in that sense He was the 
Messianic Son of God, and the passage illustrates His 
Messianic consciousness. But the relation to God 
which this involved was not 'ofi&ciar; even in His Mes- 
sianic vocation His consciousness was filial; the God 
whose kingdom He was to inaugurate was His Father 
in a vital and ethical sense — One with whom He lived 
in perfect mutual understanding, who was loved and 
trusted by Him without reserve, and to whom He could 
say in the most disconcerting situations. Even so. Father, 
for so it seemed good in Thy sight. The least ser- 
viceable, however, of all these distinctions is meta- 
physical. It means something when we say that Jesus 
was Messianic Son of God — we can put into the ad- 
jective all we know of His vocation in God's Kingdom. 
It means something when we say He was Son of God 
in the ethical sense: we can fill up the idea of Son ship 
with the love, trust, and obedience which belong to the 
filial life. But it does not mean anything which we can 
correspondingly define if we say He was Son in the 
metaphysical sense. It is only another way of saying 
with emphasis that He was Son, and of suggesting that 



ISOLATED REVELATIONS 247 

there was something in His Sonship which goes be- 
yond us. 



Isolated Expressions in which Jesus' Conscious- 
ness OF Himself is Revealed 

Up till now we have examined passages common to 
Matthew and Luke in which there was a certain con- 
tinuity, but it is necessary to look at others in which, 
though fragmentary and isolated, there is a similar re- 
velation of the mind of Jesus. It is impossible to take 
them in any chronological order, but the following are 
the most important. 

In Matt. 11^^'^^, Luke 10^^"^^ we have the woes pro- 
nounced by Jesus on Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Caper- 
naum. The mighty works He has done in them are 
referred to — miracles of healing, evidently, in which the 
goodness of God was leading them to repentance — and 
the doom of their impenitence is pronounced. It shall 
be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon, more tolerable 
for Sodom, in the day of judgment than for them. The 
work of Jesus is connected in His own mind with the 
last day. Nothing less than the final destiny of men is 
determined by their attitude to it. This sense of the 
absolute significance of the manifestation of God's 
saving power in Him pervades many of the words of 
Jesus, and is the ultimate basis of what is called faith in 
His divinity. 

Another significant passage is Matt. 12 ^''j which is 
found verbatim also in Luke 11^^ : He that is not with 
Me is against Me, and he that gathereth not with Me 
scattereth. This is on the same plane, even if it is not 
in the same key, as ^he that loveth father or mother 
more than Me is not worthy of Me.' It betrays the 
consciousness in Jesus of a significance attaching to His 



248 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

own personality and work such as has no parallel in 
Scripture. What, in His own mind, is the Person who 
thus summons men to identify themselves with Him, 
and declares neutrality impossible? Every one feels 
how weighty His words are if they really express the 
mind of Jesus about Himself, and though for those who 
remember other sayings of Jesus with which we are now 
familiar there is no reason to question them, we need 
not be surprised to find that they have been assailed 
from various sides. Wellhausen^ thinks that, to be 
relevant to the context — that is, to fit into their place 
in the argument — they must be capable of being gen- 
eralised. Jesus is only taking Himself as an exam- 
ple of a principle: He says. He who is not with Me 
is against Me, but He is not specially thinking of Him- 
self; what He means is that in any battle he who is not a 
friend is a foe. How any one can say this of a pas- 
sage in which the standing of Jesus is the very point 
at issue (notice the repeated and emphatic ly^ in Matt. 
12 ^^"^ which immediately precedes, and the saying about 
speaking against the Son of Man in Matt. 12 ^ which 
immediately follows) it is hard to comprehend. Loisy^ 
does not attempt to eviscerate the words, but suggests 
that they do not come from Jesus. He points to the 
fact that in Mark 9 ^^ and Luke 9 ^^ we have a saying 
in a somewhat similar situation — in both places exorcism 
is being discussed — but of a different spirit, though an 
analogous form. In Luke it reads. He that is not against 
you is on your side; in Mark, according to the gener- 
ally accepted text, though Wellhausen would make 
it agree with Luke, He who is not against us is on our 
side. This is more genial, more tolerant, than the 
saying in Matt. 12^°, Luke 11 ^^ and therefore may be 

» Das Evangelium Matthaei, ad loc. 
2 Les Evangiles Synoptiqiies, i. 708. 



ISOLATED REVELATIONS 249 

assumed to be a word of Jesus. Loisy assumes that it 
is the only word of Jesus on the subject, but the writer 
must confess himself quite unable to follow the process 
by which a redacteur is conjured up qui aurait cru de- 
voir retourner la sentence: 'Qui n^est pas contre vous 
est pour vous^'' en: 'Qui n^ est pas avec moi est contre 
moi.^ Aurait cru devoir is good, but it does not justify 
M. Loisy in laying on the conscience of an imaginary 
redacteur the responsibility of producing the reasons 
which he himself owes to his readers. There is in fact 
no reason whatever for this fantastic supposition, except 
the reason that Jesus must not say things which indicate 
that He had in His own mind the absolute significance 
which He has in Christian faith. The two sayings are 
quite independent — Luke, as we have seen, gives both 
— and they are strictly relevant to the context in which 
they occur. In Matt. 12^^, Luke ii^^ Jesus is discuss- 
ing exorcism with His enemies, who wish to arrest His 
beneficent work, and He says naturally, in the tone of 
warning, He that is not with Me is against Me, and he 
that gathereth not with Me scattereth. In Mark 9 *^, 
Luke 9 ^^ He is discussing the same subject with His 
disciples, one of whom has just told Him that he had 
seen a man casting out devils in Jesus' name and for- 
bidden him, because he did not follow with them. Just 
as naturally Jesus answers here, Forbid him not: he 
who is not against you is on your side. There is no 
reason to doubt either the one saying or the other, and 
both belong to the oldest stratum of evangelic tradition. 

The twelfth chapter of Matthew preserves other 
words of Jesus in which we hear Him speak of His own 
greatness. Two of these (in verses 41, 42) are found 
also in Luke (11 ^^ ^•): Behold, there is more than Jonah 
here; Behold, there is more than Solomon here. A 
third occurs in Matthew only (v. 6): I say unto you, 



250 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

there is something greater than the temple here. In all 
these passages the words underlined are neuter: Jesus 
does not say directly, I am greater than the temple or 
Jonah or Solomon, but He declares that where He is a 
greater cause is represented, greater responsibilities are 
imposed, greater issues are at stake, than were involved 
by relation to the most sacred institutions or the most 
venerated personalities of former times. It is not neces- 
sary to ask how Jesus conceived the temple or Jonah or 
Solomon to be transcended in importance by Himself: 
the significant fact is that He did. It is in the same con- 
sciousness, though in a different tone, that He speaks 
in another passage preserved both in Matthew and 
Luke, and therefore going back to their source, though 
they give it in different connections: 'Happy are your 
eyes, for they see, and (your) ears, for they hear. (For 
verily) I say unto you that many prophets (and kings) 
desired to see what you see and saw not, and to hear 
what you hear and heard not.' * The revelation made 
in Jesus not only brings great responsibilities, but rare 
blessedness. The look which Jesus here casts upon 
the past is one of the most vivid and beautiful things in 
the New Testament. He enters sympathetically into 
the yearnings of good men in distant ages, into the 
hopes that their eyes grew dim with waiting for; and 
He is conscious that their long-deferred fulfilment has 
come at last with Him. Matthew inserts the words just 
after the first parable of Jesus, or rather after the quota- 
tion from Isaiah, in which the judicial blindness of the 
unbelieving people is foretold: in Luke they stand in 
immediate connexion with the claim of Jesus to be the 
Son who alone knows and can alone reveal the Father. 
In any case, they discover the consciousness of Jesus 

1 This is Harnack's reconstruction of the passage: Spriiche u. Reden 
Jesu, 94. 



ISOLATED REVELATIONS 251 

that in Him the absolute revelation has come: those 
who know Him have the happiness which can never be 
transcended. All the hopes and longings of the good 
are consummated in it. He does not say, Blessed are 
our eyes, for they see, and our ears, for they hear, as if 
the blessedness were that of a new era in which He 
shared only as His contemporaries did; but blessed are 
your eyes and your ears; for what they saw and heard 
was seen and heard in Him. It is He Himself — His 
presence in the w^orld, and the revelation of God He 
makes in word and deed — which is the ground of His 
felicitation of the disciples. And this, be it remarked 
once more, is only another way in which He assumes 
that the proper attitude of men to Himself is that which 
is everywhere exhibited in the New Testament Church. 
He has a place which is all His own as the Mediator of 
the supreme blessedness for men, and to deny Him such 
a place is not only to subvert historical Christianity, it 
is to ignore Jesus' presentation of Himself. 

We may now proceed to consider another passage 
which certainly stood in the source common to Matthew 
and Luke, and possibly even in that source was a quota- 
tion, a passage therefore of high antiquity, yet in many 
respects hard to estimate. In Matthew it is given 
continuously in ch. 23 ^^'^^^ and forms the climax of 
the great denunciation of the Pharisees with which 
Jesus' ministry in Jerusalem closes; in Luke it occurs 
much earlier, and is broken into two. The first part 
(ch. II ^^"^1), as in Matthew, closes a series of woes pro- 
nounced upon the Pharisees, though the scene is not the 
temple, but a Pharisee's table somewhere in Galilee or 
Peraea; the second (ch. 13 ^* ^•) is connected with the 
saying of Jesus that it is not possible that a prophet 
should perish out of Jerusalem, but is not spoken in 
the capital nor at the close of Jesus' ministry. More 



252 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

remarkable even than differences like these, to which 
the gospels present many parallels, is the manner in 
which Luke introduces the words of Jesus: 'Therefore 
also the Wisdom of God said, I will send unto them 
prophets and apostles,' etc. There are only two things 
that can be said of this. Either the evangelist, for no 
reason we can see, identifies Jesus at this point with the 
Wisdom of God, and then goes on to report the words 
which Jesus spoke in this character; or Jesus Himself 
quotes from some book of Wisdom which has been lost 
to us, making (as the evangelist understood) the words 
of the Wisdom of God His own. To this we can cer- 
tainly provide no parallel, yet we may not be justified 
in pronouncing it impossible. It is plausible, indeed, to 
argue with Loisy and others that Matthew is right in 
giving the passage unbroken, and Luke in representing 
it as a citation. The point of view is that of an apoca- 
lyptic writer, surveying God's providential dealings with 
Israel, and like aU his kind renouncing hope. God has 
done everything to win them, appealed to them by 
messengers of every type — prophets, wise men, scribes; 
but from the beginning of the story to the end, from 
Genesis to Revelation in the Hebrew Bible,^ the stream 
of righteous blood has never ceased to flow ; ^ the Wis- 
dom of God has been scorned and trampled on in all 
its representatives. At last the hour of vengeance is 
at hand, but ere it strikes, the heart of Wisdom and 

1 The writer sees no need to depart from the old opinion that ' from 
the blood of Abel to the blood of Zachariah (the son of Barachiah)' is a 
way of saying ' from the beginning of history to the end ' ; the reference 
in the case of Zachariah being to 2 Chron. 24 20 ^- — 2 Chron. is the last book 
in the Hebrew canon. It is not certain that 'son of Barachiah' belonged 
originally to the text (it is wanting in Luke) ; but even if it did, it would 
only be a slip of a perfectly natural kind. As Loisy remarks, it is not 
easy to see what reason a Christian could have for putting the murder of 
Zachariah the son of Baruch by the Zealots at the beginning of the siege 
of Jerusalem on a level with that of Abel. 

2 See Matt. 23 ^s, EKxvvvdixevov. 



ISbLATED REVELATIONS 253 

of God, is revealed in the thrilling apostrophe, 'O Jeru- 
salem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets and stoneth 
them that are sent unto her, how often w^ould I have 
gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth 
her brood under her wings, and ye would not.' This is 
not (it is argued) the voice of Jesus, referring to such 
visits to Jerusalem and to such attempts to win her 
people as we see in the fourth gospel: it is the voice of 
God; Jerusalem, in this high poetic key, is not material — 
the geographical city in which Jesus was crucified; she 
is the impersonation of Israel, the mother of the children 
to whom God appeals. All this may be granted — per- 
haps we should rather say. All this must be granted — 
yet the question remains. Is it incredible that the ap- 
plication of it to Jesus should have been due to Himself? 
It is not necessary to enter into the minor changes by 
which the evangelists adapt the tradition to their audi- 
ence — ^Luke, for example, replacing the Jewish 'wise 
men and scribes' of Matthew by Christian 'apostles' — 
the two main points are the same in both. These are 
that Jesus identifies Himself with all God's action to- 
wards Israel, finding it continued and indeed consum- 
mated in Himself, and that He declares the doom of 
Israel to be involved in the rejection of Himself and 
His messengers. Now it is not too much to say that 
these are constant elements in Jesus' consciousness of 
Himself and of His significance; the last, in particular, 
has come before us again and again (v. Matt. 10 ^^ 11 ^^ ^•), 
while the first is involved in the simple conception of 
Himself as the Messiah, the person through whom God's 
purpose towards Israel is to be accomplished. All that 
remains then is the question, which is rather of curious 
than of serious interest, whether Jesus would have bor- 
rowed from a book to express elements of His conscious- 
ness so moving and profound. Assuming that a book is 



254 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

quoted, it also must have been moving and profound 
— wonderfully and divinely inspired in its apprehen- 
sion of God's relations to Israel. Nothing but the spirit 
of Christ in the writer (i Peter i ") could enable him to 
enter with such profound sympathy into God's dealings 
with Israel, and so to speak of them in words which 
Jesus could afterwards make His own. Is it not gratu- 
itous to suppose that the authority lying behind Mat- 
thew and Luke — an authority which we have good 
reason to believe to be that of the apostle Matthew him- 
self — put these words into the mouth of Jesus without 
ground? If they were incongruous with what we have 
already seen to be the mind of Jesus about Himself, we 
might accept this supposition to explain the incongruity; 
but when there is no inherent difficulty — when the self- 
revelation of Jesus here is in thorough harmony with 
that which we have already seen, on the basis of Matt. 
X. and xi., with their parallels in Luke, to be truly his- 
torical — the supposition is at least not inevitable. It 
is easier to believe that whatever the circumstances-^ 
whether in GaHlee or in Jerusalem, whether with His 
death imminent or at a greater distance from it — Jesus 
took these wonderful words to Himself. They open to 
us the mind in which He lived and died. The presence 
in the world of a Person who was able to appropriate 
such words — to identify so absolutely the actions and 
the cause of God with His own cause and actions — is 
not confined to this passage; it is, as we have amply 
seen, the signature of the gospels as a whole. It is 
the token that we have passed from the Old Testament 
to the New, and that the New is founded not only on 
the faith of Christians but on the mind of Christ.^ 

' The striking remark of Harnack on the discourse about the Baptist 
in Matt. xi. {Spriiche u. Reden Jesu, 167) is not inappropriate here: Dass 
aber der ganzen Rede das ' Ich bin es ' zugrunde Hegt, ist kein Grund zu 
Bedenken, oder man muss den Federstrich iiber ganzen Inhalt der Evan- 



THE SON OF MAN 255 

Passages in which Jesus speaks of Himself as The 

Son of Man 

In view of the doubt which has been cast on the use 
of this title by Jesus at all, it is worth while to refer 
to its distribution in the pages of the gospels. As Dr. 
Armitage Robinson has pointed out/ it occurs in every 
one of the strata of the evangelic records which criticism 
has learned to distinguish. It is found in Mark, in the 
non-Marcan source common to Matthew and Luke 
with which we are at present concerned, in passages 
peculiar to Matthew and to Luke respectively, and in 
John. Be the difficulties what they may, if anything 
can be established by testimony, it is established that 
Jesus used this phrase as a designation of Himself. It 
was indeed so characteristic of Him that no one, ap- 
parently, could give any account of how He spoke with- 
out making use of it. When we look more closely 
at the facts, however, it has to be admitted that the 
testimony as to the occasions on which it was used is 
not quite uniform. For instance, in the document with 
which we are dealing, it is sometimes not quite clear 
whether its presence is due to Jesus or to the evangelist. 
In Luke 6 ^^ we have a beatitude on those who suffer ' for 
the Son of Man's sake,' where the parallel in Matt. 5 ^^ 
has 'for My sake'; and similarly in Luke 12 ^ we have 
'him will the Son of Man confess/ where Matt. 10^^ 
gives *him will I confess.' Such disagreements, however, 
are the exception. In the vast majority of cases, where 
one evangelist has 'the Son of Man,' so has the other; 
and in view of this fact it seems an overstatement to say 
with Harnack, that while it is certain that Jesus used 

gelien ziehen. The admission of this sound principle would draw the 
pen through an immense mass of what is regarded as historical criticism 
of the gospels. 

^ The Study of the Gospels, p. 49. 



256 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

this title we cannot be certain that He used it on any 
given occasion.* The title is a significant one; and if there 
are occasions on which an utterance of Jesus depends 
for its point on this significance, and on which the use 
of the title is attested both by Matthew and Luke, and 
therefore by their source, we may surely say that on 
these occasions we have a certainty of it as well assured 
as anything can be in history. An attempt has been 
made to discredit the joint testimony of Matthew and 
Luke to some striking instances of the use of this title 
by arguing that it is in the strictest sense Messianic, and 
that Jesus could not possibly have made public and 
frequent use of it when His Messiahship was not only 
not proclaimed by Himself, but not even suspected by 
His most intimate disciples. It is pointed out, too, in 
this connexion, that in Mark, with the exception of two 
instances which are susceptible of easy explanation as 
due to misapprehension by the evangehst (Mark 2 *<^"28), 
the title is not used till after Jesus has been confessed 
as the Christ at Caesarea Philippi; and that when it is 
used subsequently to this it is in the specifically eschato- 
logical sense. That is, it designates Jesus not as actually 
the Messiah, which would be a contradiction in terms, 
no actual king being possible till the Kingdom had 
actually come; but as the Person who is to be the Mes- 
siah, and who will come in that character with the coming 
of the Kingdom. 

The evidence of Mark will be considered at a later 
stage, but the highly problematical treatment of Mark 
2 *^"2^ and the inferences drawn from it, are entirely 
insufficient to invalidate the witness of an authority 
which is at least as ancient as Mark, and had as wide a 
currency in the Church. We must not be too hasty and 
too precise in defining 'the Son of Man,' especially if 

' Spriiche u. Reden Jesu, 169. 



THE SON OF MAN 257 

the result is that many of the most moving and charac- 
teristic sayings of the gospel are obliterated, while those 
alone are left which perplex or embarrass the ordinary 
mind. The title, no doubt, goes back primarily to 
Dan. 7 ^l There, however, it is not a title, but an ap- 
pellative; not a proper name without meaning, but 
a term with essential significance of its own. What the 
seer beholds is not the Son of Man, but one like a son 
of man — that is, a human form, as opposed to the brute 
forms of the earlier visions. That this human form has 
*the Kingdom' given to it — that it is invested with a 
final, universal, and glorious sovereignty — is true; in 
that sense the vision is eschatological. This, too, facili- 
tated and made appropriate in the New Testament the 
use of the title Son of Man in eschatological connexions. 
But that on which the main emphasis lies in Daniel is the 
humanity of the form which is invested with this eschato- 
logical splendour, and though an apocalyptist might over- 
look this, it was not likely to be overlooked by Jesus. 
We do not need to trace the process by which the hu- 
man figure of Daniel's vision, which originally stood 
for Israel, 'the saints of the Most High' (Dan. 7 ^^), was 
identified with the Messiah, Israel's ideal representative; 
but we can be sure that in appropriating the title to 
Himself, Jesus did not lose the consciousness of what 
originally gave it its meaning. It was always charged 
with the idea of humanity, as well as with that of final 
sovereignty, or apocalyptic splendour. The most tech- 
nical expression would fill with finer import in the lips of 
Jesus, and admitting the Messianic and eschatological 
import of this title as it was currently used, we see no 
reason to question that Jesus may have employed it 
on occasion with an emphasis which brought out another 
part of its contents. It is the more natural to think so 
when we observe that the later New Testament writers 
17 



258 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

who indicate acquaintance with it, though they do not 
themselves use it — Paul in i Cor. 15"^* and the Epistle 
to the Hebrews 2 ^^- — connect it not with Daniel but 
with the Eighth Psalm. Here Man in His greatness 
and littleness is the Psalmist's subject, and the fortunes 
of humanity, as represented by Jesus, are what engage 
the minds of the Christian authors. 

To turn, then, to the texts common to Matthew and 
Luke, we find first, following Luke's order, that in which 
Jesus contrasts Himself with the Baptist (Luke 7 ^^ ^s 
Matt. 11" ^•) . It occurs incidentally in the vivid little 
parable in which Jesus pronounces His verdict on His 
contemporaries, comparing them, in all their relations to 
God, to wilful children, who will not be in earnest with 
religion in any form, sombre or winsome. 'John came 
neither eating nor drinking, and they say He has a devil. 
The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they 
say Behold a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber, a friend 
of publicans and sinners.' It is not easy to understand 
why Harnack thinks it 'more than doubtful' that Jesus 
used this title here. He says that in the discourse which 
precedes and of which this forms part, Jesus has clearly 
enough avoided any designation of Himself as Mes- 
siah; but He shows convincingly that the Messianic 
consciousness of Jesus pervades this speech from begin- 
ning to end. He does not regard this as unhistorical,* 
but if its historicity be admitted, why should we hesi- 
tate to think that the Messianic consciousness might 
reveal itself in a significant or suggestive term? It is 
true that Jesus did not at this period call Himself the 
Christ, and that even after the confession at Caesarea 
Philippi, He forbade His disciples to tell any one that 
He was so; but for this there were reasons. The Christ 
or the Messiah was a term which for the Jews was laden 

^ Spriiche u. Reden Jesu, 167, quoted above in note on p. 254. 



THE SON OF MAN 259 

with political meanings and hopes in which Jesus had no 
part; He deliberately avoided using it therefore, be- 
cause to use it was to excite expectations which it was 
His very calling to disown. But that is no reason why 
He should not have employed another title to express 
His unique relation to the Kingdom of God, if such 
a title could be found; a title which was at once free 
from the objectionable political associations of 'the 
Christ,' and singularly appropriate to convey some of the 
most characteristic thoughts of Jesus. The title Son of 
Man lay to His hand. It implied at once humanity and 
sovereignty, but while both of these ideas are essential 
elements in the meaning, either might be uppermost, 
while the other was more or less latent. In the passage 
before us, it is the humanity which is emphasised. The 
Baptist had seemed to separate himself from men — to 
rise, in a sense, above the measure of common humanity. 
He would not be in debt to it for anything, neither so- 
ciety nor food nor clothing. He was an exalted, ausr 
tere, and solitary being; when common sense ceased 
to be frightened by his preaching, it said 'he is pos- 
sessed by a demon — mad.' But the person whose trans- 
cendent greatness as compared with John is the pre- 
supposition of the whole discourse comes in quite another 
fashion. He is not too good to take the world as God 
has made it, to enter into the common life of men, to 
meet them, so to speak, on their own level. He comes 
'eating and drinking.' Humanity is the very badge 
and device under which he lives. This is what the 
title particularly expresses, and surely a title or de- 
scriptive designation is wanted. To put 'I' into the 
sentence instead of 'the Son of Man,' is to rob it of its 
point and beauty. But something is lost also if we 
ignore the latent sense of sovereignty which is always 
an elemenc in the meaning. To render the words as 



26o JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

O. Holtzmann does/ Es kam das Menschenkind, is to 
fail utterly to do justice to the *I am he/ which as Har- 
nack says underlies the passage throughout. Its in- 
terest, in relation to the purpose of this study, is that it 
reveals Jesus to us making (if we may put it so) in the most 
unassuming manner the most stupendous assumption — 
identifying Himself with men in all that is human, shar- 
ing with them in the humble common order of their life 
in this world, yet representing for them at that level the 
supreme wisdom of God, and betraying the sense that 
the final triumph of humanity — that victory of the human 
over the brutal in which the Kingdom of God is an- 
nounced to come — is a triumph identical with his own. 
It is not only in what have been regarded as properly 
eschatological passages that we have to think of this last 
aspect of the Son of Man: more or less it must reach 
the mind everywhere. Only because the final sover- 
eignty and all that it involves is latent in the term can 
he who says with such genial humility, The Son of Man 
came eating and drinking, say at the same time, Blessed 
is he whosoever shall not be offended in Me, or Whoso 
shall confess Me before men, him shall the Son of Man 
confess before the angels of God. 

The second of our examples is found verbatim in 
Matt. 8 '^^ Luke 9 ^^: The foxes have holes and the birds 
of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where 
to lay His head. This is surely a self-authenticating 
word. To replace the Son of Man by the personal 
pronoun is to take the weight as well as the beauty of 
the saying away. Jesus does not speak to repel the 
person — a scribe, according to Matthew — who offered 
to follow Him wherever He went, but He invites him to 
count the cost. He does not speak as if such devotion 
were beyond what He could claim; on the contrary, the 

1 In his Leben Jesu, p. 129. 



THE SON GF MAN 261 

immediate context in both evangelists represents Him as 
demanding from an aspirant to discipleship that cruel 
sacrifice of natural affection which we have already dis- 
cussed in principle: Follow Me, and let the dead bury 
their own dead. His claims cannot be put too high. 
What breaks through at this point in the use of the title 
Son of Man — a title so appropriate where Jesus finds 
that His humanity is literally all that He has in common 
with His kind, all properties and privileges of other men 
being denied Him — is this sense of the disparity be- 
tween His present lot and that which is destined for 
Him. The pathos of His situation is not that of a poor 
man, but that of a disinherited King. He is the heir of 
all things, and when He calls Himself the Son of Man, 
He betrays that He thinks of Himself in that character; 
but He sees not yet all things put under Him. How 
much of the sense of this reached the mind of His hear- 
ers — how far, for example, the scribe here addressed 
felt that the coming King had an infinitely stronger 
claim on the loyalty of his followers just because He was 
homeless as yet in the realm which was truly His own — 
we may not be able to tell. Sometimes a man, even in 
speaking to others, speaks half to himself, utters his 
mind heedless of whether it can all be apprehended or 
appreciated at the moment, because he is sure it will be 
afterwards. No one who heard this word could forget 
it. There is no reason to suppose that the authority on 
which Matthew and Luke are dependent made any 
mistake in recording it; and its whole meaning and 
power would be disclosed as other sides of what ' the Son 
of Man' meant were revealed in the teaching of Jesus. 
Passing by the occurrence of the phrase in Matt. 12 ^°, 
where we have an interpretation by the evangelist of a 
word of Jesus which is simply reported in Luke 1 1 ^^, we 
come tQ the last case in which it is used by both Matthew 



262 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

and Luke, a case of peculiar difficulty: Matt. 12 ^^, Luke 
12 ^^ Here blaspheming or speaking a word against 
the Son of Man is contrasted, as a pardonable sin, with 
blaspheming the Spirit, which is unpardonable. Such a 
contrast is only intelligible if the Son of Man is a person 
who suggests in the first instance the human rather than 
the divine, a person therefore with regard to whom mis- 
apprehension, contempt, and petulance are easy to under- 
stand and to condone. On the other hand, it is obvious 
that the title Son of Man must be significant here, and sig- 
nificant of something great: if it were merely a synonym 
for *I,' and if the speaker were only an ordinary person 
like those to whom He spoke, what He says would be 
gratuitous and even profane. Who am 'I,* to say that 
whoever speaks a word against me it shall be forgiven 
him, and to compare, or if it be preferred, to contrast 
speaking against myself with speaking against the Holy 
Spirit? Even to contrast two things implies some sort 
of proportion between them, and it is inept to say that 
a sin is pardonable, unless there is a natural presump- 
tion that it is in itself a grave sin. This is the situa- 
tion here. Jesus calls himself the Son of Man with 
the sense of what the term involves. The Son of Man 
is the destined King in the Kingdom of God, the glo- 
rious person who is to hold the sovereignty when the 
tyranny of Satan has been overthrown. It is this which 
makes speaking against Him alarming. In spite of His 
destined glory, however, He moves among men in a 
lowly guise and in familiar relations which expose Him 
to hasty and unworthy censures. It is such a censure 
that we find in the petulant outburst, 'He is beside him- 
self; but offensive as it is, the circumstances make it 
pardonable. Nevertheless, in the very fact that Jesus 
pronounces it to be pardonable, and that He names it in 
the same breath with the sin against the Spirit, which 



THE SON OF MAN 263 

He declares to be unpardonable, we see how seriously 
He regarded it, and how singularly therefore He thought 
of Himself. In its combination of self-abnegation and 
self-assertion, the passage is exactly parallel to that in 
which Jesus disclaims knowledge of 'that day or that 
hour, ' while at the same time He assumes a place higher 
than men or angels, the place of One who is 'the Son' 
in the unqualified sense in which God is 'the Father' 
(Mark 13 ^^). Schmiedel is probably right in holding 
that this saying about the pardonableness of speaking a 
word against the Son of Man is a genuine word of Jesus: 
it is certainly not likely to have been invented by people 
who worshipped Him. But even if he were wrong, and 
Wellhausen were right in his belief that the true form of 
Jesus' words is preserved in Mark, the result, so far as 
our argument is concerned, would hardly be affected. 
In Mark (3 ^^ ^•) , there is no mention of the Son of Man, 
but all sins are said to be pardonable to the sons of men 
except that of blaspheming the Holy Spirit. Now the 
sin of blaspheming the Spirit, as the context shows, 
is the sin of those who look at the works of redeeming 
love wrought by the Spirit of God in Jesus — for it is by 
the Spirit of God he casts out demons — and ascribe them 
to Beelzebub. In other words, it is by a sin committed 
against the person and work of Jesus that men involve 
themselves in unpardonable guilt. This puts Him even 
more unequivocally than the form of words common to 
Matthew and Luke into a place of peculiar greatness. 
It identifies Him with the cause of God in that absolute 
fashion of which we have already had illustrations, and 
it makes the destiny of men depend for ever on their 
attitude to Himself and His work.^ 

In the passages which have just been reviewed what 
is uppermost in the title Son of Man is the suggestion of 

» On this paragraph, see the author's article in The Expositor, Dec. 1907, 



264 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

humanity — the lowliness of Jesus, His kinship with men, 
that in His aspect and circumstances which exposes Him 
to depreciation and misunderstanding. The other side 
of the meaning — that in which the glorious destiny of the 
Son of Man is involved — can never have been absent, 
though in these cases it is more or less latent. Matthew 
and Luke have, however, in common another series of 
passages in which the glorious destiny of the Son of Man 
is the very thing which is affirmed. They are to be found 
in Matt. 24 "• 37. 39. 44 . i^^y.^ j^24, 26. 30^ ^^io^ 'p^^ these 

we should perhaps add Luke 12 ®, though in the parallel 
in Matt. 10 ^^ the Son of Man is wanting, and is represented 
by 'L' In all these passages the eschatological meaning 
is undoubted: Jesus speaks of Himself definitely as the 
person in whom the glorious prophecy of Dan. 7 *^ ^- is 
to be suddenly and finally fulfilled. Hence there can be 
no question that Jesus Himself inspired the hope of His 
Return which fills the New Testament. If He renounced 
Messiahship in the political sense in which it was popular 
with the Jews, He claimed it in the supernatural sense 
which had gathered around it since Daniel. He identified 
Himself with the human form to which 'the kingdom' 
was to be given. Nothing isolates more conspicuously 
Jesus' sense of what He was in relation to God and to 
man. Nothing marks off His consciousness of Himself 
more distinctly from every form of prophetic conscious- 
ness than this, that whereas the prophets looked forward 
to the coming of another, what Jesus saw as the final and 
glorious consummation of God's purposes was His own 
coming again. It is not to the purpose to raise here the 
question how far the words of Jesus are to be taken 
literally, or how far they are merely symbolical — how 
far they have proved substantially true, or how far we must 
acknowledge in them that illusive element which is in- 
separable from predictive prophecy. When we consider 



THE SON OF MAN 265 

that everything else in the seventh chapter of Daniel is 
symbolic — the sea, for example, and the brutal monsters 
which arise out of it — it is at least plausible to argue that 
much of what is spectacular in Jesus' words about the 
sudden and glorious advent of the Son of Man is sym- 
bolical also. We are as likely to misunderstand Him 
if we read in a legal or prosaic spirit, pressing the literal 
meaning of every term, as if we exaggerate the symbol 
till no palpable fact remains. But whatever the true 
method of interpretation may be, it cannot be questioned 
that in His own mind Jesus was identified with that mys- 
terious and transcendent Person through whom the 
kingdom of God at last comes in glory. If we knew 
nothing of Jesus but this, it might well seem disconcerting : 
He could be represented with much plausibility as the 
victim of a fanatical delusion. But the mind of Jesus 
about Himself, in relation to God and to the establishment 
of His kingdom, has already come before us in a great 
variety of aspects, and forbids any such conclusion. That 
mind, it is not too much to say, is throughout consistent 
with itself, and in harmony with the place claimed by 
Jesus in the prophecies of His glorious Coming. It is 
not fanatical, and there is no shadow of unreality about 
it; the unique place He assumes, the unique authority 
He claims to exercise, vindicate themselves in the mind 
and conscience of man. It is not only in its glorious con- 
summation that the kingdom is identified with Him; 
it is identified with Him all through His career. The 
attitude which He requires of men is involved in this 
fact, and it is always the same. When He speaks of His 
Advent in glory and of the manner in which the destiny 
of men is then decided for ever by their relation to Himself, 
He only concentrates into one tremendous expression what 
is the burden of His self -revelation from beginning to end. 
So far as it has been carried, the results of our investi- 



266 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

gation are, we venture to assert, entirely favourable to the 
catholic Christian attitude to Jesus. The investigation 
has been strictly limited to the oldest accessible authorities 
— the source common to Matthew and Luke, with one or 
two references at the outset to Mark; and the conclusion 
is all the more important. We do not say that it vindicates 
any particular Christology — Arian, Athanasian, or Kenotic; 
or even any of the Christological types represented in the 
apostolic writings. But it does what is infinitely more 
important. It demonstrates — the word is not too strong — 
that Jesus was not, in His own consciousness of Himself, 
merely one man more in the world, though one who (as 
it happened) knew God better than others; He was not 
simply a prophet like those. who had gone before; He 
was not a Jew who like all other Jews saw the will of 
God in the Old Testament, but believed Himself to possess 
a better way of doing it than the other teachers of the time; 
He was not 'the ideal religious subject,' the inspiring 
pattern of man's true attitude to God. He was more than 
all this, and in some respects very different from all this. 
*The whole literature,' we may say — borrowing for appli- 
cation to the earliest evangelic records what Professor 
Cairns has observed of the New Testament in general — 
'the whole literature is inspired by the conviction, not 
simply that something new has been discovered, but that 
something new has happened.''^ When Christ is in the 
world it is another world; there is a Person in it to whom 
our attitude must be other than it is to men in general, 
just because He is and reveals Himself to be other. ' Men 
there have been who felt themselves able to say "/ knoWy* 
and who died like Him for their convictions. But He was 
able to say "/ aw." I am that to which prophecy has 
pointed, and was able to feel Himself worthy to be that.'^ 

' Christianity in the Modern World, p. 147. 
2 G, A. Smith, Jerusalem, ii. p. 548. 



JESUS IN MARK'S GOSPEL 267 

This is indeed the vital point of difference between the Old 
Testament and the New, the foundation on which alone 
Christianity can rest as a faith specifically distinct from 
that of the Old Testament. It is so far from being the 
truth that the Son has no place in the gospel as it was 
preached by Jesus, that the gospel, even as preached by 
Jesus, is constituted by the presence of the Son in the 
world, and the place given to Him in religion. There 
is no Christianity except through a particular attitude of 
the soul to Jesus, and that attitude of the soul to Jesus 
is demanded at every point, in every relation, and in 
every mode, tacit and explicit, by Jesus Himself. Chris- 
tianity is what it is through the presence in it of the Medi- 
ator, and it is not only in the faith of Christians but in 
the mind of Jesus Himself that the character of Mediator 
is claimed. It is a character, happily, which can be 
recognised without raising either physical questions, or 
metaphysical — without asking, not to speak of answering, 
the questions to which the creed makers and the authors 
of Christologies have devoted their powers; but to recog- 
nise it means that Jesus becomes the object of our faith. 
We trust in Him, commit ourselves to Him, believe in God 
through Him, and are conscious when we do so that we 
have reached the final truth of things. 

Up to this point, we have examined mainly discourses 
of Jesus as recorded in Q, and have based our argument 
on the words of Jesus Himself. But while speech is in 
some ways the most adequate expression of mind, a man 
may reveal what he is, and what he conceives himself 
to be, by action, which is more speaking even than words. 
It has already been noticed that the second of the early 
witnesses to Jesus — the Gospel according to Mark — con- 
tains few discourses of Jesus: it is a picture of His life 
rather than a record of His words. It is, however, a very 
early picture, and there can be no doubt that it circulated 



268 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

in the Christian churches, whether in documentary form, 
or through the labours of catechists, contemporaneously 
with the source we have already scrutinised. Whether 
there was any closer connexion between the two it is 
perhaps impossible to tell. Scholars have come to no 
convincing conclusion. Wellhausen thinks Mark the 
earlier, and that where the other source departs from 
Mark we see traces of the progressive Christianising of 
the record — that is, of its lapsing from the mind of Jesus, 
who was not a Christian but a Jew, to the mind of the later 
church about Jesus; Weiss, after the studies of a lifetime, 
persists in the belief that Mark is the later of the two, and 
in many essential respects was dependent on the other.* 
Whether the theory of successive editions of Mark would 
enable criticism to find a way of reconciling these contrary 
opinions is a doubtful question, but hardly of importance 
in this connexion. To all intents and purposes, except 
those of literary criticism, Mark and Q are contemporary 
witnesses to Jesus : each of them tells us what was believed 
about Him in the church not far from a.d. 70, and the 
only thing that is of interest is whether or not they concur 
in their testimony. This will appear as we proceed. 

Mark opens with a title or superscription which cannot 
be ignored: 'the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, 
Son of God. ' As these words show, he has a conception 
of Jesus and of the meaning of His life, death and resur- 
rection; and it is in the light of this conception that he 
interprets the facts. Jesus is to him the Messiah, and 

1 Weiss has succeeded in convincing Harnack that Mark was acquainted 
with Q, though Harnack thinks this important result may have to be 
limited to this intent, that Mark at least knew the circle in which Q (or 
great parts of Q), before being fixed in writing, existed in a fixed oral 
form which was practically the same. See note on p. 176 above. This 
limitation, however, really means that Harnack is not convinced by 
Weiss' s arguments, so as to accept Weiss' s view of the literary relations 
of Mark and Q; it is Harnack's recognition of the fact that a larger part 
must be given to oral tradition, as well as to documents, in explaining 
the composition of our gospels. 



JESUS IN MARK'S GOSPEL 269 

the story of His life, when read out in its religious signifi- 
cance, is gospel or glad tidings. It was not possible for 
him to tell the story otherwise than he has done, for this 
is the truth of Jesus as it has been apprehended by him. 
No doubt a life of Jesus could have been written by one 
who never became a believer — by an agent, for example, 
of the Jewish or of the Roman government — who ob- 
served Him from the outside, as it were, without sympathy, 
and without being drawn into unison with His mind and 
purpose; but it would not follow that such a life would 
be truer than the representation of Jesus made by a believer. 
On the contrary, the very things that in a great spiritual 
life are most real and most significant would baffle the 
supposed impartial observer; he would either be uncon- 
scious of them, or they would mock his power of descrip- 
tion and comprehension. Only a person responsive to 
the kind of influence Jesus exerted is qualified to convey 
a true impression of what He was. It may be quite 
natural for him, in trying to convey such an impression, 
to set the facts with which he has to deal in a certain light; 
but just in proportion as he reverences Jesus — just in 
proportion as he believes in Him and calls Him Lord — 
will it be unnatural for him to distort facts or to invent 
them. 

Mark's History the History of the Son of God 

That the story of Mark is the story of the Christ, of 
One whose consciousness from first to last is that of the 
Messianic King through whom the reign of God is to 
be established, is shown by the fact that like the source 
already examined Mark begins with the Baptism and 
the Temptation of Jesus. He has no interest in any- 
thing that precedes; he brings Jesus on the stage in 
the hour in which His divine sonship is proclaimed, and 
it is in this character that he conceives Him living and 



270 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

acting all through. What the sonship to God means is 
rather to be made out from the gospel — which is, so to 
speak, a progressive illustration of it — than deduced 
from the words. The term Christ or Messiah, though 
used in the title, is not at this point used in the history. 
Perhaps that is to preclude misleading inferences. As 
the Son of God referred to in the ideal picture of the 
second psalm, Jesus is the Anointed in and through 
whom God's Kingdom is to be established; He is the 
Messiah; but the nature of His Messiahship and of the 
sovereignty it is to establish awaits definition in His 
life. It may quite well be that the Christ of God is not 
the same as the Christ of fanatical Jewish hopes. This 
apart, however, there is not for the evangelist any con- 
sciousness of himself on the part of Jesus except the 
Messianic self-consciousness; it is as Son of God that 
He lives, moves, and has His being, and it is in this char- 
acter and consciousness that He is exhibited in the gospel. 
It is more than daring simply to set this aside. If we 
know anything at all of Jesus, we know that He was bap- 
tized by John, and that the baptism represented a crisis 
in His experience : if it did not mean what all our author- 
ities represent it to mean, we may as well cease to ask 
questions about Him. From first to last in the gospel, 
Jesus acts as one conscious of a unique vocation, a unique 
endowment, a unique relation to God and men. It is 
easy to decide on a priori grounds that this is impossible, 
and not merely to leave the only Christianity known to 
history without explanation, but to pronounce it a complete 
mistake; it is easy to do this, but it is not writing history. 
If the life of Jesus reflected itself, in minds which sub- 
mitted to its influence, in the form which we see in the 
gospel, then all the probabilities are that that form is 
substantially correct. This word or that may have suf- 
fered modification in transmission — this incident or that 



A TYPICAL MIGHTY WORK 271 

may have been pointed or deflected as it was preached in 
this or that environment — but the attitude of Jesus to God 
and to men, and the attitude which this required on the 
part of men to Jesus, cannot have been misconceived and 
cannot be misrepresented. It is the direct and uncon- 
scious reflexion of an immediate impression, and the 
possibility of error is excluded. 

Jesus is introduced in Mark as * calling' men to foUow 
Him, as preaching in the synagogues, 'as one having 
authority/ and as casting out demons (Mark i ^^'^^), The 
evangelist does not represent Him as making formal 
claims from the outset, or putting His consciousness of 
His relation to God and man into challenging words, but 
the spiritual power with which He was invested in the 
baptism, and which marks Him out as the Son of God, 
underlies all His words and deeds. The Messiahship is 
exhibited, but not stated: this at least is how the evan- 
gelist understands it. That he is right in so understanding 
it is clear from the words of Jesus Himself (in Matt. 11 ^), 
which we have considered above (p. 230 f.). To heal 
the sick and to preach the gospel to the poor, inadequate 
and unsatisfactory as some onlookers might think it, is 
emphatically to do ' the works of the Christ.' We do not 
read the opening scenes in Mark as they were meant to 
be read if we do not perceive that the Messianic conscious- 
ness of Jesus is latent in them and is the key to which 
they are all set. 

A Typical dovafiig or Mighty Work in which Jesus' 
Consciousness of Himself is revealed 

(Mark 2 '-^2) 

This will become unmistakable if we examine such a 
typical instance in Mark of the duvdfxec? to which Jesus 
appeals (Matt. 11 ^^ ^■) as the healing of the paralytic in 
ch. 2 *"^^. There are several points of interest in this 



272 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

narrative which it is important to notice. When the man 
was brought to Jesus, Jesus said to him, Child, thy sins 
are forgiven. Some scribes who sat by accused Him of 
blasphemy: Who can forgive sins but God only? Jesus 
had His own way of dealing with the charge, but there 
are moderns who clear Him at a much easier rate. His 
words, they tell us, were merely declaratory : as He looked 
on the face of the paralytic man. He saw that he was 
truly penitent for his sins — presumably those which had 
induced the palsy; and knowing that under the rule of 
a paternal God penitence and pardon are correlative 
terms, He simply announced to the man what was true 
quite independently of the announcement, that his sins 
no longer stood against him in the reckoning of God. 
This, however, is entirely out of keeping with what fol- 
lows. Jesus does not claim power on earth to declare 
that sins are forgiven, but to forgive them (ver. lo) ; and 
the scribes were quite right in assuming that He exer- 
cised the prerogative of pardon. He Himself proceeds 
to act upon their assumption. It is easy to say. Thy sins 
are forgiven, but not easy to tell whether anything is 
accomplished by the words. Who can tell whether the 
spiritual miracle which they assume — for of all things 
that we can conceive the forgiveness of sins is the most 
purely supernatural — really takes place ? Who can certify 
us that the load is really lifted from the bad conscience, 
that despair passes away, that the gate of righteousness 
opens again to the man who had shut it in his own face? 
It is an objection of this kind, an objection not to a decla- 
ration but to what purports to be a real exercise of the 
prerogative of pardon, that Jesus meets in what follows. 
It is easy to say to a paralysed man, Arise, take up thy 
bed and walk; but it is hazardous, because if nothing 
happens the pretensions of the would-be healer are ex- 
posed. Jesus puts Himself to this test, and heals the body 



JESUS FORGIVING SINS 273 

with a word the effect of which is sensible and indisputa- 
ble, that men may believe that He has power also to heal 
the soul. He works on this poor man the comprehensive 
miracle of redemption, forgiving all his iniquities, healing 
all his diseases. It is not declarations we have to do with, 
here or anywhere in the gospels, but achievements. Jesus 
no more told the man his sins were forgiven than He told 
him he was not lame. With the same word of redemp- 
tive power He lifted the disabling touch of sin from his soul 
and of paralysis from his limbs, and in doing so revealed 
what He was. 

And what was He? Plainly for such as had faith like 
the paralytic and his friends He was the bearer of God's 
salvation: the power of God for man's deliverance in 
all his sorest troubles was present in Him. To refer 
again to Matt, n ^ (2) ^^ ggg jjj^^ here doing *the works 
of the Christ.' And here comes in another point of in- 
terest in the narrative. It contains, in the lips of Jesus 
Himself, what we have already seen to be a Messianic or 
quasi-Messianic title — the Son of Man: *That ye may 
know that the Son of Man hath power upon earth to 
forgive sins, He saith to the sick of the palsy, Arise, take 
up thy bed and go to thy house.' It has come to be 
taken for granted with a certain school of critics that 
there must be a mistake here. The Son of Man, it is 
argued, just because it is a Messianic title, could not be 
used by Jesus openly and at this early stage. If we ex- 
cept this instance, and another in ver. 28 of this chapter, 
Jesus never uses it in Mark till after Peter has confessed 
Him to be the Christ at Caesarea Philippi (ch. 8 2^), and 
even then the disciples are commanded to keep the Mes- 
siahship a secret. This, it is assumed, answers to the ac- 
tual course of events. Further, what logic requires (it is 
said), both here and at verse 28, is not 'the Son of Man' 
but 'man' simply. The Pharisees say, Who can forgive 



274 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

sins but God only? and Jesus is supposed to answer, I 
will prove to you that not only God in heaven but man 
upon earth has power to forgive. This is supported by 
the close of the parallel passage in Matthew (9 ^) : They 
glorified God who had given such power to men — that 
is, to beings of the class to which Jesus belonged. The 
elimination of the Son of Man from verse 28 is equally 
plausible. Logic seems thoroughly satisfied when we 
read, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the 
Sabbath; wherefore man is lord also of the Sabbath. 
The introduction of the Son of Man into these narratives 
is ascribed to mistranslation. In Aramaic, the language 
of Jesus, a human being was spoken of as A son of man; 
and some misapprehension of this Semitic idiom led to 
THE Son of Man being introduced here instead of the 
generic term expressing humanity. The mistake mars 
the logic of the passage, and is inconsistent with what 
the evangelist elsewhere tells us of the time and circum- 
stances under which Jesus did speak of Himself as 
the Christ, but happily we are able to correct and ex- 
plain it. 

In spite of the fact that this explanation and correc- 
tion have become almost a tradition of criticism, the 
writer has no hesitation in accepting the gospel narrative 
as it stands. No part of the process by which 'the Son 
of Man' is eliminated can stand scrutiny. The expres- 
sion is said to be due to mistranslation of an Aramaic 
document in which 'son of man' occurred in the sense 
of 'human being.' To say so is surely to forget that the 
contents of the gospel history did not circulate in the 
Church merely in the form of one man's translation 
of an Aramaic document. Granting that Mark could 
make the kind of mistake which is here supposed, we 
must remember that the story which we know only through 
him must have been known to multitudes of Christians 



JESUS FORGIVING SINS 275 

before he wrote; and if they all knew it in the true form — 
which ex hypothesi they must have done, as the mistake 
originated with him — it is inconceivable that there should 
be no trace of the true form left, and no indication of any 
attempt to correct Mark. The text of the gospels was 
not sacrosanct in early times. Matthew and Luke, who 
can both be shown to have used Aramaic documents 
independently,^ no doubt follow Mark closely at this point; 
but even if they follow him also unthinkingly, we are safe 
to say that all three tell the story in the only form in which 
it could be told to the apostolic Church, a form which had 
the apostolic testimony behind it, and which could not 
have been modified for the whole Church, at an essential 
point, by the mistranslation of any person whatever. 

Further, the displacement of 'the Son of Man' by 
*man' has only a superficial plausibility in logic. The 
healing of the palsy by Jesus does not prove that man 
generically can forgive sins. The man who does the 
visible miracle in confirmation of his claim to do the 
invisible is to be taken at his word: but it is no more 
true that man generically can speak the word of forgive- 
ness with divine effect than that man generically can 
effectively bid the lame walk. The only question raised, 
and the only question settled, is one concerning the power 
claimed by Jesus; and it is settled, not by bringing Jesus 
under the general category of humanity, but by an act 
of Jesus Himself which was as impossible for men in 
general as the forgiveness of sins. It is not any man, but 
only He who has the right to think of Himself as the 
Son of Man, who can forgive sins upon the earth. This 
is all that is covered by the healing of the paralytic. Mu- 
tatis mutandis, the same considerations apply to the pas- 
sage about man and the Sabbath. 

But this is not all. The passage with which we are 

* See Wellhausen's notes on Luke 6 23, 11 *K 



276 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

dealing is the first in the gospel in which Jesus is directly 
challenged while engaged in His vocation. He is doing 
the very work which He has come to do — revealing Him- 
self in His proper character as the Person in whom God 
has visited men for their deliverance from sin and misery — 
when His authority is called in question. He is in truth 
the representative of God, but the suggestion is made 
that so far from representing He blasphemes, invading 
impiously a prerogative reserved for God alone. Are 
not the circumstances fitted to evoke such a kind of self- 
assertion as is found in the use here of the tide 'Son of 
Man'? It is no doubt a Messianic or quasi-Messianic 
title, but it is not simply equivalent to the Christ. The 
Messiah whom it suggests is not any Messiah — is not, 
for example, the Messiah of national and political hopes 
— but a transcendent person of some kind; one through 
whom the Kingdom of God is to triumph, of course, but 
one whose very name emphasises humanity as opposed 
to brutality. It is in keeping with the character of such 
a Messiah that He should wish to forgive sins and heal 
diseases; it is in keeping with Jesus' consciousness of being 
such a Messiah that He should have and exercise both 
these divine and gracious powers. We have seen already 
how Jesus employs the title Son of Man on occasions 
where His humanity, in the ethical sense, is to be empha- 
sised (see p. 256 f.) ; and it is this which in the first instance 
is to be kept in view here. In spite of the fact that it is • 
mainly used — in agreement with its source in Daniel 7 *' — 
in eschatological passages, it is not exclusively eschatolog- 
ical in import. It is the name which describes Jesus in 
His vocation as the Person through whom the Kingdom 
of God is established, and it indicates that the Kingdom 
of God is at the same time the Kingdom of humanity, the 
condition of things in which man is redeemed from the tyr- 
anny of brutal forces, and all humane ideals are realised. 



JESUS FORGIVING SINS 277 

It IS relative to the Kingdom of God, just as the Son, sim- 
pliciter, is relative to the Father; but the Kingdom of 
God to which it is relative is a kingdom of grace in which 
men are forgiven all their iniquities and healed of all 
their diseases. Hence Jesus frequently uses the title Son of 
Man when He wishes to speak of Himself in the light of 
His vocation, as the Person doing the works that belong 
to the establishment of such a kingdom. 'The Son of 
Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.' 'The 
Son of Man came, not to be ministered unto but to minis- 
ter, and to give His life a ransom for many.' 'The 
Son of Man hath power upon earth to forgive sins.' The 
name as used here is in keeping with Jesus' use of it on 
these other occasions, and it is thoroughly appropriate. 
But to displace it by 'man' is to introduce what is not 
only unexampled elsewhere in Scripture, but in itself 
inept and untrue. Accepting, therefore, the evangelic 
record of Jesus' words at this point, we find in them an 
indication, belonging to the earliest period of His min- 
istry, that He lived and worked in the consciousness of a 
relation to God and to the bringing in of His reign among 
men which can have belonged to Him alone — such a 
relation, in short, as makes Him not the pattern of good- 
ness merely, but the object of religious faith to all who 
look for salvation in the coming of God's Kingdom. 
Now this, as we have repeatedly seen, is the attitude of 
Christian faith to Christ, and therefore we conclude once 
more that such faith is justified by Jesus' consciousness 
of Himself. 

Before leaving this passage it is proper to remark on 
the reference in it to faith. 'When He saw their faith 
Jesus said to the paralytic. Child, thy sins are forgiven.' 
The faith meant is that of the paralytic and his friends: 
their assurance that help could be had from Jesus was 
so great that they overcame every obstacle in order to 



278 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

reach Him. Per omnia fides ad Christum penefrat. 
The power that brings man help is, of course, in every 
case ultimately the power of God, and therefore in a 
true sense God is always the object of faith; but the 
point here is that God's power to help is present in Jesus; 
it is mediated through Him and through Him alone, 
and hence He also becomes, as no other can be, the object 
of faith. This is the one attitude to Him which the New 
Testament discovers, and quite apart from this or that 
word in which He revealed His own expectation or de- 
mand, it is inconceivable that this attitude should have 
been mistaken. It was evoked by Jesus as the reality 
of what He was and did impressed itself on those who 
were in contact with Him. The Jesus to whom the New 
Testament bears witness evokes the same attitude still. 
But if it needed more explicit justification, that justifica- 
tion would be found in the many striking words of Jesus 
about faith. He says to suppliants for help, 'Believe ye 
that I am able to do this?' He says to the woman who 
was healed by touching the hem of His garment, *Thy 
faith hath saved thee.' He says to Jairus, when news is 
brought that his daughter is dead, 'Be not afraid, only 
believe.' The faith that He claims in this last instance 
is the utmost reach of faith which can be demanded from 
man. The great enemy of faith is death. We can keep 
hold of God, and hope for His help, as long as there is life; 
but death seems to end all. Yet even in the presence 
of death Jesus says, Fear not, only have faith. The 
words have no relevance at all unless they mean that 
the saving help of God which is present in Jesus is stronger 
even than death, so that he who beheves in Him can 
defy the last enemy. A recent commentator on Mark * 
says that the only thing in this narrative which speaks 
to us with living and personal power is the faith of Jesus — 

' J. Weiss, Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments, i. ii8; also p. 46. 



THE BRIDEGROOM 279 

His confidence that the Father would go with Him to the 
ruler's house and enable Him to meet whatever emer- 
gency there was; but surely the demand of Jesus that in 
the very presence of death Jairus should not renounce 
hope, but believe that the power of God to be exercised 
through Him would be equal to any extremity of need, is 
quite as remarkable. What Jesus requires is not that 
Jairus should directly exhibit the same faith in God as 
He Himself did — a faith at which the commentator re- 
ferred to can only hold up his hands in blank bewilderment 
— but that in His company, and relying on what God would 
do through Him, he should not despair. The help of God 
for the man was to be mediated through Jesus, and through 
Jesus also the faith of the man in God was to be mediated. 
There is no other relation of God's help to man, or of 
man's faith in God, known either to the gospels or the epis- 
tles in the New Testament; and we repeat, it is incon- 
ceivable that at this vital point the convictions and ex- 
periences evoked by Jesus should have been at variance 
with the mind of Jesus Himself. 

The Bridegroom and the Children of the 
Bridechamber 

(Mark 2 ^«-2°) 

One of the passages in Mark which would formerly 
have been pointed to without hesitation as indicating the 
peculiar self-consciousness of Jesus is that in which He 
answers a question about fasting. * Why do the disciples 
of John and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but Thy 
disciples fast not? And Jesus said to them. Can the 
children of the bridechamber fast while the Bridegroom 
is with them ? As long as they have the Bridegroom with 
them they cannot fast. But days will come when the 
Bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then 
shall they fast in that day' (Mark 2^^-20). Originally, 



28o JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

only the last verse of this was questioned. Jesus, it was 
said, did not at this early period anticipate His own death, 
and He certainly did not begin to speak of it to His dis- 
ciples till much later. ^ Further, the mention of His 
death is irrelevant : all that it is necessary to say is, ' Can 
the children of the bridech amber fast as long as the Bride- 
groom is with them? My disciples and I are a wedding 
party, and therefore fasting is out of place. ' But a more 
penetrating 'application of this same kind of criticism 
carries us further. The inventive evangelist who added 
verse 20 from his own resources has been severely lectured 
for perverting the parabolic saying in verse 19 into allegory, 
and then continuing the allegory mechanically in verse 
20, on the line of the history of Jesus and His Church. 
But there is something to be said for him, nevertheless. 
What is the tertium comparationis which would make it 
possible for Jesus to compare His disciples to guests at 
a wedding, for whom fasting would be out of place? It 
neither is nor can be anything else than the conception 
of Jesus Himself as the Bridegroom. But this is an 
allegorical conception.^ To suppose that Jesus spoke of 
Himself as a Bridegroom, or as the Bridegroom, is to 
suppose that He had recourse to allegory — a supposition 
which is nothing short of distressing to many honourable 
men. Hence we are rather to suppose that the whole 
passage is due to the productive activity of the Church. 
Jesus really had no part in it. The transaction which it 
perpetuates was not one which took place between John 
and Jesus, but between the disciples of the two Masters. 
It has no meaning for the time to which it is said to 
belong, but only for the future. After Jesus died, His 

1 The Death of Christ, p. 23 f. 

^ Wellhausen, Das Evangelium Marci, p. 20: 'Es schimmert also schon 
in 2 ^9 der allegorische Sinn durch (auch in dem Ausdruck so lange der 
Brdutigam hei ihnen ist statt wahrend der Hochzeit), und man darf 2 20 
nicht davon abschneiden.' 



THE BRIDEGROOM 281 

disciples departed from His practice. They took over 
from John's disciples not only baptism but prayer (Luke 
II ^) and fasting. Jesus is here represented as giving 
them permission for the fasting, though a permission 
that only comes into effect after His death. ^ 

All this, we have no hesitation in saying, is as dull as 
it is gratuitous. No one denies that there were in the 
lifetime of Jesus followers of John and Pharisees as well 
as disciples of Jesus Himself. They represented dif- 
ferent types of religion, in spirit and observance, and 
the differences between them were both reflected on by 
Jesus independently, and discussed by their adherents. 
There is a notable word of Jesus about fasting in the 
Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 6 ^« ^•) ; in Matt. 11 2-^^ and 
in the parallel passages in Luke, Jesus expressly com- 
pares Himself and John as religious leaders, and points 
the difference between them in the very sense of this 
passage; and He frequently came into collision with the 
representatives of Pharisaism on ritual observances of 
an analogous character (v. Mark 7 ^ ^-^ Matt. 15 ^ ^O. It 
is simply a mistake, therefore, to say with Wellhausen 
that the subject has no significance for the time at which 
it is introduced, but only for the future : the subject is one 
of a class which was undoubtedly discussed by Jesus 
oftener than once or twice. But if we recognise this, it 
will not be without influence on our interpretation and 
appreciation of the passage as a whole. If Jesus is the 
Speaker, His words must be something else than the 
legitimation of the practice of the early Church as to 
fasting, in contrast with the practice of the disciples in 
His lifetime. Nothing is less credible in the lips of Jesus 
than such artificial and prosaic legalism. But the words 
cease to be legal and prosaic, they become personal and 
inspired, poetic and moving, above the common measure 

^ All this is borrowed from Wellhausen as above. 



282 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

even of the words of Jesus, provided we admit the possibil- 
ity that Jesus could speak of Himself as the Bridegroom. 
And why should it be impossible ? It is the same thought 
which meets us again in the parable — with allegoric traits 
in it no doubt, but why not? — of the king who makes a 
marriage for his son (Matt. 22 ^). It has echoes in 
Eph. 5 2^ ^- and in Rev. 19 ^, 21 ^. It has antecedents in the 
Old Testament conception of God's relation to Israel. 
Certainly it is an extraordinary thing that Jesus should 
have conceived in this way His relation to the new people 
of God which was gathering round Him, but everything 
in Jesus is extraordinary. After the incident and the 
self -revelation of verses i to 12, we do not expect platitude 
or commonplace here; and the sense which Wellhausen 
extracts is poorer than platitude or commonplace. With 
the Bridegroom among them, the disciples can fairly be 
compared to a marriage party in which fasting would be 
incongruous; and what can be truer to nature than that 
the Bridegroom, even while he defends their joyousness, 
should become sensible, in the very disposition of those 
who question it, of that suspicion and malignity toward 
Himself which would one day end in murder, and turn 
the joy of the bridal party into a sorrow in which fasting 
would be sadly spontaneous? The unity, the inner 
truth and the poetic charm of the whole utterance are 
indisputable, unless we deny that Jesus could think of 
Himself as the Bridegroom; and for such a denial there is 
no ground except that it implies a consciousness on Jesus' 
part of HimseK and of His place in God's work which 
men are resolved, on grounds with which historical criti- 
cism has nothing to do, not to recognise. As it stands, 
the revelation which it makes of Jesus is in harmony 
with everything which has hitherto been presented to us 
in the record, and we need have no hesitation in replying 
on it as true. 



THE UNPARDONABLE SIN 283 

The Unpardonable Sin : Mark 3 ^'^ 

(Matt. i2 2*-32, Luke 12 ^o) 

We have already examined, in the source common to 
Matthew and Luke, the words of Jesus about a sin for 
which there is rro forgiveness. The saying on this subject 
in Mark, though it differs by not mentioning the Son of 
Man, throws an equally striking light on Jesus' con- 
sciousness of Himself. It is pronounced with a solemn 
assurance of its truth. 'Verily I say unto you that all 
things shall be forgiven to the sons of men, the sins and 
the blasphemies wherewithsoever they have blasphemed. 
But whoso shall have blasphemed against the Holy Spirit 
hath not forgiveness for ever, but is guilty of an eternal 
sin.' How is this sin committed? The Holy Spirit is 
that divine power which is manifested in Jesus as He 
casts out evil spirits; it is not something distinct from 
Him and to be contrasted with Him; it is simply God 
acting through Him for the deliverance of men from 
Satan. There are cases in which God acts, as it were, 
from behind a screen, and it is possible not to recognise 
Him, and to sin or blaspheme inadvertently and there- 
fore pardonably; but in the case before us it is different. 
The works that Jesus did were so palpably the works 
of God, the operations of His holy redeeming power, 
that inadvertent failure to recognise them for what they 
were was impossible. The dullest spectator was bound 
to say, as the magicians of Egypt did of Moses, This is 
the finger of God (Ex. 8 ^^ Luke 11 ^o) : nothing but the 
blackest malignity could whisper. He has an unclean 
spirit, He casts out demons by Beelzebub. Nothing 
could more convincingly show how entirely Jesus identifies 
Himself with the cause of God and His Kingdom. That 
absolute significance of his Person and His work to which 
reference has been so frequently made already is the 



284 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

fundamental idea here also. The solemnity and vehe- 
mence with which He speaks — 'hath not forgiveness for 
ever, ' * is guilty of an eternal sin ' — reminds us of the words 
in which He pronounces woes on the impenitent cities 
(' it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon, for Sodom 
and Gomorrah, in the day of judgment than for you'), 
or of the awful warning to whoso shall deny Him before 
men (' him will I also deny before My Father which is in 
heaven'). The cure of demoniacs had a peculiar value 
for Jesus as a demonstration that God 's victory over Satan 
was actually in process of accomplishment, that the King- 
dom of God, if one might dare to say it, was no longer a 
thing to be waited for, but had come to men while as yet 
they did not realise it (Matt. 12 2*) ; but the victory of God 
and the coming of His Kingdom are identified with Jesus 
and His work. They are mediated for the world through 
Him, and it is because things so great are mediated 
through Him that unpardonable guilt attaches to those 
who slanderously misinterpret what He does. One 
may be excused if he hesitates between the forms in 
which Jesus' saying has been preserved by Mark and by 
the other early source, but there is no doubt that in either 
form the divine power of God at work for the redemption 
of men is identified with Jesus in His own words. In 
His own mind — we have the most solemn assurance of 
it — He had the same place as the Mediator of God's 
salvation which He has always had in Christian faith. 

The Messiah and the Cross 

(Mark 8 ^^-lo ") 

Such passages as those we have just examined reveal 
or rather betray the consciousness of Jesus as to His 
place in the world, and in the working out of God's 
purposes towards men. What He is, however, cannot 
be told, unless it has been in a sense discovered. The 



THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 285 

impression which He made on those who were in close 
contact with Him — the impression produced not by ex- 
plicit words only, but by His life as a whole, and especially 
by the attitude He assumed towards them and expected 
from them — this impression, especially if He confirmed 
it, is an important part of the revelation of what He 
was. Scholars generally have agreed that in the gospel 
according to Mark there is a historical sequence trace- 
able, in a large way, which is less evident in the later gospels. 
At first Jesus works among His own people, and at first, 
too, not without response. His mighty works naturally 
excited enthusiasm. Such as it was, this enthusiasm 
seems to have reached high-water mark in the feeding of 
the five thousand, and from that time forward it ebbed. 
The feeding of the five thousand has greatly exercised 
those who cannot believe in it, and the most various at- 
tempts have been made to rationalise it and get rid of the 
miracle. Either it is said the miracle was a spiritual one — 
Jesus, to speak in the language of the fourth gospel, 
fed the multitudes with the bread of life, the word of 
His teaching; or He and His disciples, sharing their 
scanty store of provisions with the crowd, prompted 
others to follow their generous example, and drew forth 
more than enough for all. Such explanations fail to do 
justice to the fact that, according to all our records, the 
feeding of the five thousand produced an immense excite- 
ment from which Jesus and the disciples found it necessary 
but hard to make their escape. Jesus compelled the 
Twelve, who no doubt shared the popular enthusiasm, 
to go out to sea and face a rising storm rather than founder 
in this spiritual whirlwind; and He Himself retired to 
the mountain to pray (Mark 6^^^).* He deliberately 

1 The account given in the fourth gospel of the feeding of the multi- 
tudes has many features which suggest that it came from an eye-witness. 
Incidentally it explains the otherwise perplexing word rjvdyKaaev in 
Mark 6 ^^ and || Matthew. The multitudes wanted, in the enthusiasm of 



286 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

refused to enlist under the banner of Jewish expectations, 
and from this time forward the breach between Him and 
His countrymen widens. A little later, apparently, there 
is a decisive rupture with the recognised religious authori- 
ties about the traditions of the elders, and He retires with 
the Twelve into the country north of Galilee (Mark J ^^■). 
So far, it may be said. He has failed to make on the peo- 
ple the impression He desired, and His interest is hence- 
forth concentrated on the few who have been more inti- 
mately related to Him. Have they penetrated His secret ? 
Are they able to take Him for what He is in His own 
estimation, and so to continue His work in His own sense ? 
This is the decisive question with which we are con- 
fronted at the beginning of what Wellhausen has de- 
scribed as the Christian section of the gospel of Mark: 
'And Jesus went forth, and His disciples, into the vil- 
lages of Caesarea Philippi: and in the way He asked 
His disciples, saying unto them. Who do men say that 
I am? And they told Him, saying, John the Baptist; 
and others, Elijah; but others, one of the prophets. And 
He asked them. But who say ye that I am? Peter an- 
swereth and saith unto Him, Thou art the Christ. And 
He charged them that they should tell no man of Him' 
(Mark 8"^). We have seen already that the unique 
self-consciousness of Jesus, which is divinely assured 

the moment, to take Jesus by force and make Him a king. The disciples, 
whose hopes were still in many respects like those of the multitudes, 
were only too ready to fall in with this revolutionary movement, and it 
was against their will that Jesus compelled them to start for the other side. 
For Him personally it meant the recurrence of the temptations in the 
wilderness: all three of them can easily be discerned in the narrative. 
His own sense of this would be marked by His withdrawal to the moun- 
tain to pray — His flight {(t>evyE/.) as some ancient authorities read in 
John 6 15. The way in which the fourth gospel explains Mark at this 
point supports the accuracy of both, and makes it impossible to reduce 
the feeding of the five thousand to an improvised picnic. Whether we 
can explain it or not, it was an extraordinary event of some kind, agitating 
in its immediate circumstances for all concerned, and a turning-point 
in the history of Jesus and in His relations with His people. 



THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 287 

from the baptism onward, breaks forth at intervals 
in Mark, especially when His authority or His work is 
challenged: here we see that it is an interest to Jesus 
Himself, that He has reflected on what He is, and is con- 
cerned that men should apprehend Him truly. The 
question, it might almost be said, is more significant than 
the answers. Jesus is not only conscious that He is a 
problem to men, He assumes that He ought to be. It is 
not right that people should be indifferent to Him, should 
never give Him a thought, or should dispose of Him sum- 
marily by saying that of course He is what other people 
are, and that no more need be said. To His mind, evi- 
dently, there can be nothing so important as that men 
should have received a true impression of Him, should 
think of Him as He thinks of Himself, and in their attitude 
to Him respond to what He knows Himself to be. 

The opinions of the people are of little interest except 
as showing that no one regarded Jesus as a commonplace 
person. Every one recognised in Him a divine messenger 
of some kind — the Baptist returned from the dead; Elijah, 
the promised forerunner of the Messiah; or an ordinary 
prophet — one of those who appeared long ago. These 
are, without exception, the opinions of people who can 
hardly have known Jesus at all. No one who had been 
in His company could imagine that He was any one 
redivivus, any one but Himself. He was not the reani- 
mation of any dead past, but an absolutely living Person, 
with His hand on the present and the future. When He 
turns to the Twelve, whom He had chosen that they might 
be with Him (3 "), and so come to know Him truly, and 
asks them, But you, who do you say that I am? He gets 
an answer which does justice at least to this difference. 
Peter, expressing apparently the faith or the conviction 
of all, says to Him, Thou art the Christ. 

We cannot tell all the thoughts and hopes whic^ii gath- 



288 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

ered round this designation for Peter and his comrades. 
At the very lowest, to call Jesus Christ was to call Him 
King; it was to recognise in Him the Person through 
whom God 's sovereignty was to be established, and God 's 
promises to His people fulfilled. But it might be used by 
men whose conceptions of the nature of that sovereignty, 
and of the processes by which it was to be established, 
were inconsistent, defective, or obscure. Peter might have 
the assurance that he must owe to Jesus all that God was 
going to do for Israel or for the human race, and in the 
strength of that assurance he might call Him the Christ, 
while yet he remained much mistaken as to what God was 
going to do, or how it was going to be done. What is 
properly implied in ascribing to Jesus the title of 'the 
Christ' is a certain attitude of soul to Him, the recogni- 
tion in Him of the King through whom the blessings 
of the heavenly kingdom are to be mediated to men, the 
acknowledgment of His claim to absolute loyalty and 
obedience; that is all. We do not mean that this all is 
little; on the contrary, it has been and remains the essence 
of the Christian faith. But it is quite compatible with 
much ignorance and misconception as to the Kingdom 
of God; and when we consider the fanatical hopes which 
attached to the name in many Jewish minds, we can well 
understand that while Jesus welcomed in the disciples that 
attitude to Himself which their confession involved, 
He forbade them to tell any one that He was the Christ. 
The truth there was in their confession — the spiritual 
truth involved in their loyalty to Jesus and their assurance 
that all divine blessings would be mediated to them through 
Him — is a truth which literally cannot be conveyed by 
telling; it can only be realised in the experience of intimacy 
with Jesus like that through which the Twelve them- 
selves learned it. To go about saying to people who 
did not know Jesus that Jesus was the Christ was only 



THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 289 

to dififuse misconception. It was to draw men round 
Him with passionate hopes which He knew could never 
be fulfilled. What He found in the attitude and hopes 
of the Twelve was rather a basis on which He could 
proceed to initiate them further into the truth of His 
own relation to the Kingdom. They had realised that 
it was somehow identified with Him and dependent 
upon Him — this is what is meant by calling Him the 
Christ; its nature and character were bound up in His; 
but they did not yet understand what its coming meant 
for Him. They did not really think of its coming, they 
only indulged wild fantastic hopes of it; and it became 
the task of Jesus to discipline their thoughts to the ap- 
prehension of the stern moral realities of His vocation, 
realities which for His consciousness were so inevitable, 
or rather so divinely involved in His work. 

It is difficult to understand how this representation 
should be questioned. The gospel according to Mark, 
although it is a gospel, purports also to be a historical 
narrative. We have seen already the evidence which 
connects it with Peter. It is admitted by unprejudiced 
judges to have been written at a time at which disciples 
of Jesus might well have survived. Wellhausen, who 
thinks that the section with which we are dealing — 
chapter 8 ^' to chapter 10 ^^ — has been pronouncedly 
* Christianised,' and to that extent rendered unhistorical, 
allows that it is in favour of Mark, as contrasted with 
what he regards as a later source, that the Christianising 
is limited to this section. But the fact that it is limited 
to a section proves that it is not 'Christianising' at all. 
'Christianising' means the transmutation of the facts in 
the history of Jesus in such a sense that they shall support 
(which of themselves they would not) the later beliefs of 
Christians. But a writer who sought the support of Jesus 
for the subsequent faith of the Church would not seek 
19 



290 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

it only in the last weeks or months of His life. If he 
' Christianised ' the story he would not be able to do other- 
wise than Christianise it altogether. The occurrence of 
the 'Christian' phenomena in this section of the gospel, 
and in this only, proves that we have to do not with any 
dogmatic transmutation of the facts, voluntary or involun- 
tary, but with proper historical tradition. This is the course 
of Jesus' life and teaching as the witnesses reported it. 
It is not the evangelist, but the criticism which accuses him 
of 'Christianising' his story, which is not historical but 
dogmatic. On grounds quite unconnected with history, 
it is unable to give to Jesus the place given to Him in the 
faith of New Testament Christians, and it is precluded 
therefore from admitting that Jesus can Himself have 
assumed or claimed this place. But the evidence of Mark, 
that after a certain crisis in His career the character of 
Jesus' ministry changed, is real historical evidence, which 
cannot on grounds like these be treated as if it did not 
exist. Nothing would more surely remain in the mind of 
Peter than that, after the crisis referred to and the con- 
fession of Jesus as the Christ on that memorable day at 
Caesarea Philippi, his Master had withdrawn to a large 
extent from teaching in the synagogues or preaching to 
the multitudes on the hill-side or by the lake shore, and 
had devoted Himself more privately to the training of the 
Twelve. If Jesus did act in this way, the difference would 
be so striking that it would naturally impress itself on the 
memory, and be reproduced in any narrative which was 
at all in contact with the facts. It has been shown above 
that the gospel narrative, which has the historical support 
of the evangelist's testimony, has also an inner consistency 
which pleads in its favour. Admitting that Jesus in His 
lifetime was connected with the Messianic hope at all — 
and the superscription on the Cross is of itself a demon- 
stration that He was — it is thoroughly natural that He 



THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 291 

should accept the title from the Twelve, expressive as it 
was of a spiritual attitude to Himself which He recognised 
as His due, that He should forbid them to use it publicly, 
because it was sure to be misunderstood, and that He 
should devote Himself thenceforth to opening the minds 
of the Twelve to a better comprehension of what His 
vocation as the Christ involved. The outward attestation 
and the inward consistency of this are evidence of the 
highest importance for its truth. To say, in spite of such 
evidence, that the characteristic ideas of Mark 8 " to 10 *^ 
do not really belong to the history of Jesus, but are the 
reflection into His history of the faith of Pauline Christians, 
who assumed that Jesus must have shared and expressed 
their own belief in His Messiahship and in His atoning 
death and resurrection, is historically gratuitous. But 
it is worse than gratuitous to suggest that the allusions 
at various points to the secrecy of the teaching, or to the 
want of understanding on the part of the disciples (e.g. 
9 ^^f 9 ^^'^^) , are indications that the writer who thus mis- 
represented the facts, knew what He was doing, and felt 
it necessary to apologise for it. He was aware that Jesus 
in His lifetime never spoke any such words, and that no 
such ideas had then been in the disciples' heads; but he 
writes that Jesus did speak the words — only secretly; 
and that the disciples did hear them — only they could not 
take them in.^ Surely the presumption is, to put it at the 
lowest, that the evangelist was a rational and moral being, 
and would act accordingly. In the connexion in which 
it stands, therefore, and with the historical support which 
it can claim, we do not find it necessary to dispute Mark's 
representation of the mind of Jesus at this stage in His 
history, because it implies a continuity between the self- 
revelation of Jesus in His lifetime and the faith of the 
Church in Him after His death. On the contrary, such 

* See Wrede's Das Messiasgeheimniss in den Evangelien, passim. 



292 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

a continuity seems as natural in itself as it is needful for 
the understanding of the Christian religion, and is rather 
to be regarded as an indication that the evangelist is in 
touch with truth. What then is the truth in regard to 
Jesus and His vocation to which we are introduced in this 
section as present to the mind of Jesus Himself? 

Speaking broadly, it is the truth that in the Messianic 
calling, as Jesus conceived it, and felt Himself bound to 
fulfil it, were involved the death and resurrection of the 
Messiah. On the three distinct occasions on which He 
sought to initiate the Twelve into His own thoughts, these 
are the constant elements in His teaching (Mark 8 ^\ 9 ^\ 
10^^). He never, indeed, so far as appears, uses in these 
lessons the title of *the Christ'; He speaks uniformly of 
the Son of Man. His intention in this may have been, 
on the one hand, to avoid the term which was most heavily 
loaded with political associations; and on the other, to 
employ that which, just because it was transcendent or 
supermundane, could be more easily spiritualised, and 
which in its very form suggested that no experience of 
man could properly be alien to Him. Again and again 
and again during these last weeks and months He tells 
the disciples that the Son of Man must die, and after three 
days rise again. It is not necessary here to consider 
whether this or that detail in these predictions of the 
death and resurrection of Jesus may have been added 
ex eventu by Christian preachers or catechists.^ It is 
quite conceivable that some touches in the prophetic pic- 
ture may have been introduced in this way, but that does 
not affect the evangelist's testimony — and it must be 
repeated that it is testimony — to the fact that during the 
last period of Jesus' life His death and resurrection were 
the subjects that engrossed His thoughts.^ The resur- 

^ See the writer's The Death of Christ, p. 28. 

' If there is anything in the gospels which was certainly not invented, 



THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 293 

rection, indeed, is merely mentioned (though the notice 
in ch. 9 ^" that the disciples questioned with one another 
what the rising from the dead should be, shows that it 
was mentioned with a significance which arrested attention), 
but the sufferings and death are dwelt upon with ex- 
traordinary emphasis. It is as though Jesus were saying 
to His disciples all through this period, I am indeed the 
Messiah, the Person through whom God's Kingdom 
with all its hopes and blessings is to be realised, and you 
are right to recognise Me as such. But the Kingdom is 
not what you think, and as little is the vocation of the King. 
The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected, 
and be killed. His death is divinely necessary; it has to 
be faced in the path along which the Father calls Him. 
The loyalty which you rightly exhibit when you call 
Me 'the Christ' must be loyalty to one who dies in the 
Christ's vocation. The coming of the Kingdom is de- 
pendent not only on the presence of Jesus upon earth, 
but on His passion; the hopes which are fulfilled for us 
through Him are fulfilled through His death. The men- 
tion of the resurrection on every occasion on which the 
death is mentioned suggests that the action of Jesus in 
the Messianic character does not cease with His death, 
but is continued after it on a grander scale; the attitude 
of the disciples toward Him when they made the confession 
at Caesarea Philippi is to be maintained through the 
death and beyond it. It will not be changed, it will be 
intensified and made unchangeable, when those who have 
felt, with whatever indefiniteness, that Jesus is the Person 

it is the story of Peter rebuking Jesus, and of Jesus turning on the chief 
of the apostles with the terrible reproof, 'Get thee behind Me, Satan; thy 
mind is set not on the things of God, but on the things of men.' The 
truth of this incident is all the proof we need that Jesus had spoken with 
impressive earnestness of His sufferings and death as involved in His di- 
vine vocation. The attempts to discredit it made by Wrede {Das 
Messiasgeheimniss in den Evangelien, p. 115 ff.) and Loisy (Les ^vaf^giles 
Synoptiques, ii. 20 ff.) really do not call for serious criticism. 



294 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

through whom God's saving help must come to them, 
realise that nothing less than His sufferings and death 
are required in order that it may come with effect. There 
is nothing in this that can properly be called doctrine, 
and unless we deny that Jesus ever thought of His 
death, or maintain that He could not possibly have 
seen in it the cup which the Father gave Him to drink, 
there is no reason why we should question the value of 
the gospel record. Its importance to our present pur- 
pose is that it shows us the death of Jesus bulking in 
His own thoughts as it did in those of the primitive 
Church. Possibly the primitive Church may have made 
reflections upon it which were not His, but it did not 
give it another or a greater place than He. The King- 
dom is dependent on the King, and in some divinely 
necessary way on a King who dies for it: this is the 
mind of the primitive Church — the characteristic attitude 
of Christian faith — but it is also the mind of Jesus. 
The Church is not, in this characteristic attitude, 
yielding to an impulse of its own which sets it at va- 
riance with its Lord ; its sense of obligation to the 
death of Jesus corresponds to the emphasis which Jesus 
Himself lays on His death as involved in the Messianic 
calling. 

It is hardly possible to assume that the sentences in 
Mark which immediately follow the rebuke to Peter 
stand in close historical connexion with it (ch. 8 ^^-9^). 
To part of them very exact parallels are found in Matthew 
and Luke in two different connexions; in Matt. 16 ^*'^* 
and Luke 9 ^^'^^j which are the counterpart of Mark at 
this point, and again in Matt. 10 ^^ ^- and Luke 14 ", 17 ^. 
These last we have already considered as part of the non- 
Marcan source common to Matthew and Luke (see 
p. 209 f.), and it is not necessary to examine them again. 
Jesus requires in them an absolute devotion to the King- 



THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 295 

dom of God, but to the Kingdom as a cause which is indis- 
tinguishable from Himself. 'Whoso shall lose his life 
for My sake and the gospel's shall save it.' Mark is the 
only evangelist who introduces 'the gospel' in this way, 
and the expression may be due to him; but there is no 
reason to doubt that Jesus gave His Person the significance 
here ascribed to it in relation to the Kingdom.^ In pre- 
cisely the same way, too, as in the non-Marcan source, 
He appeals to what will take place at the last day to set 
this significance in the strongest light. 'Whoso shall be 
ashamed of me and My words in this adulterous and 
sinful generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be 
ashamed when He comes in the glory of His Father with 
the holy angels.' This is the only passage in the gospels 
in which the word 'to be ashamed' {inat^xOveffeat) is 
used, but this does not justify us in deriving it from Paul, 
who also uses the word only once (Rom. i ^®) in the same 
connexion. If Jesus could say the things we have already 
seen about confessing and denying Him before men, He 
could quite easily speak of men being ashamed of Him 
and His words. A close connexion with the context 
is not to be forced. It is quite needless to argue that what 
is in the mind of the evangelist is specifically what Paul 
calls the offence of the Cross — the offence which has just 
been illustrated in the case of Peter — and that the shame 
in question is precisely that which Jews would feel 
before their countrymen in acknowledging a crucified 
Messiah; and then to infer from this that Jesus never used 
such words at all, but that an evangelist, steeped in the 
Pauline gospel, has put them into His lips. Surely there 
is no want of clearness, as Loisy would have it, in the idea 
that Jesus will be ashamed of those who are ashamed of 
Him, and that He will be ashamed of them in circum- 

» Loisy can say no more against it than ' II est possible que les mots " k 
cause de moi" n'appartiennent pas h. la sentence primitive.' 



296 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

stances in which everything for them depends on His 
recognition. The words never fail to impress those who 
hear them, and this is all they were intended to do. The 
evangelist may have found them in some other connexion, 
or perhaps in no connexion at all; but he must have con- 
ceived them to be relevant when he introduced them here, 
and there is not the shghtest reason to suggest that they 
do not represent the mind of Jesus. And once more we 
must say it is a mind in which Jesus has the place and 
significance which He has always had in the faith of the 
Christian Church. 

Before proceeding to examine the striking reference 
to the death of Jesus with which this section in Mark 
closes, we may refer to the singular passage in ch. 9 ^^'^^. 
With the exception of ch. iv. (the parables) and ch. xiii. 
(the eschatological discourse) this is the only place in 
which Mark gives any considerable number of Jesus' 
sayings. They do not seem to be chronologically and 
historically connected, but rather to be linked to each 
other by some association of ideas, or even by the recurrence 
of the same terms. They may all be said to turn, in a 
manner, on the moral temper proper to disciples, and 
several of them are distinguished by a peculiar use of the 
term 'name' in connexion with Jesus. 'Whoso shall 
receiveoneof such children in My name' — im rw 6v6fxari 
fiou — 'receiveth Me' (ver. 37). 'We saw one casting out 
demons in thy name' — iv rt5 ovofxart auo — 'and we for- 
bade him' (ver. 38). 'There is no one who shall do a 
mighty work in My name' — im rtD dvofiari /mou — 'and 
shall be able quickly to speak evil of Me' (ver. 39). 
'Whoseover shall give you a cup of water to drink in 
name that ye are Christ's — h Svofxart ore //>£(7roy ^(tts — 
'verily I say unto you, he shall not lose his reward.' The 
recurrence of ' the name ' of Jesus here is very remarkable, 
and there are analogous examples elsewhere in the gospels. 



THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 297 

Cf. Matt. 10 ^^ ('hated by all for My name's sake' — 8id rd 
ovofxa fjLou) ; also Matt. 24 ^, Mark 13 *^, Luke 21 ^^, where 
dcd TO ovo/xd fiou occurs not in the 'little Apocalypse,' 
but in the part of the apocalyptic discourse which is gen- 
erally admitted to come from Jesus; Luke 21 ^^, svezev 
TOO 6v6iiar6<: fioo, where the parallel in Mark 13 ^ has 
ivexev i/uLouj for My sake; and finally Matt. 19 ^^ where 
ivexa TOO dv6jj.aT6<^ fxoo = ioT My name's sake, corre- 
sponds to Mark 10 ^^, ivexev i/xoo xai too iuayy£Xcoo = 

for My sake and the gospel's, and to Luke 18 ^^ eZvexev 
T^9 jSaffdeta? too 6200 = ioT the Sake of the Kingdom of 
God. A comparison of all these instances will show that 
the evangeHsts felt at liberty to convey what they knew 
to be the meaning of Jesus with a certain degree of freedom; 
but it will hardly be doubted, however we try to interpret 
the separate appHcations of it, that a unique significance 
is asserted for Him, in relation to the Kingdom of God, 
through all the varieties of expression.* It is their relation 
to Him that exposes the disciples to universal hatred 
(Mark 13 *^) ; it is through reHance on Him that the saving 
power of God is bestowed on men, and they can do mighty 
works (9 ^^) ; it is because the little ones are connected 
with Him that the smallest service done them is sure of 
its reward (9 ^^) , and that any wrong inflicted on them is 
threatened with the most terrible judgment (Matt. 18^). 
When we reflect how impossible it is to substitute any 
other name here for the name of Jesus, or to suppose that 
any other person could assume that he had that unique 
significance in relation to the Kingdom of God which 
Jesus here assumes for Himself, we must admit that the 
place which apostolic faith assigned Him in the true re- 
ligion is no other than that which His self-revelation 

1 Klostermann on Mark 10 29 suggests that possibly eveKsv e/iov Kal rov 
evayyeXiov^ evsKev rov bvojuarog /uov, evekev riiq ^aGLkeiag rov deov are all 
expansions of an original eve/cev kfiov. If this were so it would rather 
strengthen than weaken the argument. 



298 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

demands. It does not transcend that self-revelation, 
it corresponds to it, when we hear Peter declare after the 
resurrection that there is none other name under heaven 
given among men whereby we must be saved (Acts 4 ") . 
The last of the sections in Mark which deal with the 
Messiah and the Cross is peculiarly important (10^^"*^). 
It opens with a historical reminiscence which it requires 
some courage to question. 'They were in the way going 
up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was going before them: and 
they were amazed; and they that followed were afraid.' 
We cannot fix the locality, but the time meant is certainly 
not far from the end; they may even have crossed the Jor- 
dan and been moving toward Jericho. The kind of lead 
which Jesus took {^v Ttpodywu) was apparently what amazed 
them; He had never before stepped out in front of them 
in this fashion, as though He were impatient to reach His 
journey's end. It is probably a true remembrance of 
the temper of Jesus all through this journey when Luke 
tells us that 'He set His face stedfastly to go to Jeru- 
salem' (9^^), and that somewhere in the course of it, 
with His eye upon the end. He exclaimed, 'I have a 
baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened 
until it is accomplished' (12 ^^); it is in this temper that 
we see Him here. He is absorbed in something which 
the disciples have not taken in: He is rapt in it as He 
was in the earlier work of His ministry when His friends 
said He is beside Himself. 'They that followed' do not 
seem to be the Twelve, but others who had gathered 
about Him on the way; their fear may only be the sense 
of something unnatural in such an overstrained mental 
condition, as they would think it, or it may have been due 
to the feeling that Jerusalem was an unsafe place for a 
person with the ideas and purposes of Jesus. But, how- 
ever we are to read the situation, it is a situation so unique 
and so vivid that it is impossible to regard it as unreal. 



THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 299 

The key to it is contained in Bengel's comment on the 
corresponding paragraph in Matthew: Jesus jam turn 
habitabat in passione sua. It is with this preoccupation 
that He once more takes the Twelve apart, and begins to 
tell them the things that are to befall Him. The subject is 
still the Son of Man, and in detail the prediction surpasses 
those that have gone before,^ but that need not make us 
question the fact that in the memorable circumstances 
described Jesus tried once more to initiate His disciples 
into His own conception of what was involved in the Messi- 
anic calling. He was under no illusion about what His 
going to Jerusalem meant, but He set His face stedfastly 
to go, nevertheless. He was conscious that there was 
a divine necessity in it to which He was called to submit, 
and He sought to enlighten the disciples concerning it. 
The lesson was no more successful than those which 
preceded. Luke puts in the strongest language its com- 
plete failure. *And they understood none of these things, 
and this saying was hidden from them, and they perceived 
not the things which were said' (18^*). Mark (followed 
by Matthew) does not as at 9 ^^ comment upon their want 
of intelligence, but he records an incident which sets it 
in the strongest light. 

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, come to Him 
with a request that they may sit, one on His right hand 
and the other on His left in His glory. This request is 
one of the irrefragable proofs that Jesus was regarded, 
even in His lifetime, as the Christ — that is, as the Person 
through whom the Kingdom of God was to come. Luke, 
no doubt, omits the whole incident, though he gives in 

1 It can hardly be doubted here that the event has given precision to 
the prophecy. In Mark it is virtually a programme of the Passion nar- 
rative in all its details. How unconsciously a catechist or preacher would 
give this kind of definiteness to what Jesus said of 'the things that were 
to befall Him' is apparent here from Matt. 20 i^, who, though in other 
respects dependent on Mark, introduces 'crucify' into his version of 
Jesus' words instead of ' kill.' 



300 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

another connexion (22 ^^'^'') some of the words spoken by 
Jesus on this occasion, but that gives us no reason for 
doubting its historical character. 'Luke always spares 
the Twelve. ' The disciples had already begun to believe 
in Jesus as the Christ, and when He resolved to go up to 
Jerusalem they felt that a crisis in His fortunes (and in 
their own) was approaching. As Jerusalem drew near, 
many who followed Jesus thought that the Kingdom of 
God was on the point of appearing (Luke 19"). James 
and John evidently shared these expectations, and it was 
the intense preoccupation of their minds by them which 
made them insensible to Jesus' words. It is quite gra- 
tuitous to say that the request they make to Jesus would 
be more appropriate if it were connected with a saying 
like that in Matt. 19^^ and Luke 22^^, in which Jesus 
promises the disciples that they v/ill one day sit on thrones 
judging the twelve tribes of Israel,^ and that the evangelist 
here has lost the true perspective. What this means is 
that only the words preserved in Luke 22 ^*"^^ can claim 
to be regarded as words of Jesus: the whole conversation 
of Jesus with the sons of Zebedee is fiction. Most people 
will find it difficult to treat such criticism seriously; one 
can imagine motives for it, but no reason, at least none 
that falls within the domain of history. The request of 
the two brothers is seriously made, and it is seriously 
taken by Jesus, but it only reveals the immense gulf 
between His mind and theirs. He accepts, indeed, and 
this is the point we must emphasise, their implied homage 
to Him as the King. He is going to come in glory and to 
sit on His throne, and it will be the supreme honour to 
sit at His right hand and His left. It is not only in their 
consciousness but in His own that the supreme place in 

' So Loisy ad loc, who finds in this connexion an explanation of the 
word 'sit,' which he thinks otherwise inappropriate, in the request of 
James and John. 



THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 301 

the Kingdom of God belongs to Him. But He knows 
as they do not the way which leads to that glory. He has 
a cup to drink, a baptism to be baptized with, before He 
ascends the throne. It is through drinking that cup — 
the cup of bewilderment which the Father is putting into 
His hand; through being baptized with that baptism — 
letting all the waves and the billows of the agony which 
clouds the future pass over Him: it is through awful ex- 
periences like these that His triumph is to be achieved 
and His Kingdom won. He knows this — how can we 
deny that He knew it unless by accusing Him of an inability 
to discern the signs of the times like that of which He 
impeached His contemporaries? — and He knows also 
that the only way to greatness in the Kingdom of God 
is that which He Himself must tread. Hence, far as the 
thoughts of the disciples are from His own thoughts. 
He recognises their seriousness and their loyalty when 
He says : * You know not what you ask. Are you able to 
drink the cup which I drink, and to be baptized with 
the baptism with which I am baptized ? ' There is nothing, 
they feel in their hearts, that they would not do with Him 
and for Him, and they answer, 'We are able.' Appre- 
ciating their sincerity and devotion, Jesus takes them at 
their word. 'The cup which I drink ye shall drink, and 
with the baptism with which I am baptized shall ye be 
baptized.^ It is becoming common now for critics to 
assume that this implies the martyrdom, in the strict sense, 
of James and John,^ and the natural inference of course 
is that Jesus never spoke such words. He could not fore- 
tell the violent death of the brothers. But it is the inter- 

1 So Loisy, ii. 238: 'Pour celui qui a redige cette prediction, la mort 
sanglante des Zebedeides etait un fait acquis, appartenant au passe, comme 
la passion meme de Jesus.' Part of the attraction of this interpretation 
is no doubt the fact that it supports the statement of the Papias fragment 
published by De Boors (Texte u. Untersuchungen, v. ii. 166 ff.) that 
James and John were killed by the Jews (presumably in Jerusalem), and 
that John therefore cannot have been the author of the fourth gospel. 



302 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

pretation which is wrong. The mood in which Jesus 
speaks of the things which are to befall Him as a baptism 
and a cup is not one which lends itself to such painfully 
prosaic treatment. It is nothing short of absurd to say 
that unless James and John were put to death — strictly 
speaking, it should be crucified — the words *Ye shall 
indeed drink of My cup and be baptized with My baptism' 
are meaningless or untrue. They are full of truth and 
meaning in the lips of Jesus, not because James and John 
were subsequently put to death for the gospel — no one can 
prove this by historical evidence — but because He saw 
that these brave and simple souls, uninteUigent though 
they were, had it in them to follow Him to the end. When 
He declines to assign them places on His right hand and 
His left, it is not that He disclaims His own place as King: 
but the honours claimed are not to be assigned by favour, 
but to those for whom they have been prepared. On 
what principle they are prepared we get a hint from what 
follows. 

James and John had apparently approached Jesus in 
private, but what they had done became known. The 
other disciples, who suffered from the same misconcep- 
tions of the Kingdom and the same selfish ambition, 
were provoked. Jesus called them to Him and gave 
them all a lesson on the true nature of greatness, which 
was at the same time a lesson on the Kingdom and its 
King. 'Those who are accounted to rule the Gentiles 
lord it over them, and their great ones deal arbitrarily 
with them. But it shall not be so among you. But 
whoso will become great among you shall be your ser- 
vant, and whoso will become first among you shall be 
slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to 
be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for 
many.' What mainly concerns us here is the self -revela- 
tion of Jesus in the last sentence. The law of the King- 



THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 303 

dom is illustrated supremely in the person of the King: 
it is in Him we see what greatness is and how it is attained. 
It is attained by service; at its greatest height it is attained 
by a service which for lowliness and sacrifice can never 
be outdone. The Speaker is the King, the Son of Man, 
who is to sit on the throne of His glory: and He is con- 
sciously reflecting, as in other places where He speaks of 
having come (Mark 2^^; Luke 9^^ 12 *% 19 ^''; Matt. 
5 ^\ 10^*^), on His vocation and the way in which it is 
to be fulfilled. There could not be a more solemn utter- 
ance, and most people will feel a natural reluctance to 
suppose that it has been modified in tradition. Yet this 
is one of the points at which a considerable body of criti- 
cism assails the evangelist's testimony. The last words of 
the sentence — 'and to give His life a ransom for many' — 
are denied to Jesus. Partly this is done for what may 
be considered a properly critical reason. The parallel 
in Luke, it is said, does not contain them. But it is a 
fair question how far there is a parallel in Luke at all. 
Luke, as has been noticed, omits the whole incident of 
the sons of Zebedee, and the words of Jesus he reports 
in 22 ^'' — 'For who is greater, he that sitteth at meat or 
he that serveth? is it not he that sitteth at meat? but I 
am among you as he that serveth' — while they are akin 
to what we find here, are definitely appropriate to the 
supper-table at which they are spoken, and cannot be 
assumed to be an earlier and truer form of Mark 10'*^. 
Dismissing this textual reason, then, as inadequate to 
throw suspicion on the words, we turn the other way 
in which they are questioned. They represent, it is said, 
the Pauline doctrine of redemption, and are not on the 
same plane with the rest of the passage. When Jesus 
speaks of service, He speaks of something in which the 
disciples are to follow Him: 'I came not to be ministered 
unto but to minister, and you must live in the same spirit ; 



304 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

you must serve as I serve if you wish to share My greatness 
in the Kingdom.' This, it is said, is intelligible and 
ethical, in harmony with all the teaching of Jesus; but 
with the giving of His life a ransom for many we have 
a ij.£rd^afft<s el<s akXo yivo's'^ — the thought is transferred 
to another plane. This is not a service in which the 
disciples can follow Jesus; it is irrelevant and inappro- 
priate here; and the inference is that it is not due to Jesus, 
but is an incongruous supplement to His words by the 
evangelist. 

In spite of the imposing names by which it is supported, 
this is not an argument which impresses the writer. The 
idea contained in the words ' to give His life a ransom for 
many' is not one which can have been strange to Jesus. 
The problem of finding a ransom or equivalent for for- 
feited lives is one to which He has already alluded in 
ch. 8 ^' : ' What shall a man give in exchange for his soul 
(or life) ? ' It appears in Old Testament passages with 
which He cannot but have been familiar. ' None of them 
can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a 
ransom for him: (for the redemption of their soul is costly, 
and must be let alone for ever:) that he should still live 
alway, that he should not see corruption' (Ps. 49 ^^O- 
This supreme need of man — this service that none can 
render either to himself or his brother — is suggested also 
in Job 33 ^^^* : ' His soul draweth near to the pit, and his 
life to the destroyers. . . . Then He is gracious unto him, 
and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have 
found a ransom.' It pervades the fifty-third chapter of 
Isaiah, where there is the same contrast as here between 

^ This is how it is put by Wellhausen, Evangelium Marci, ad loc. 
Loisy, ii. 241, says: 'L'idee de la vie donnee en rangon appartient k un 
autre courant que celle du service.' The other courant is that of Pauline 
theology. He refers to Rom. 15 3, Phil. 2 ^-s, Gal. i *, 2 20, and then 
writes: 'Mark 10 ^^ parait congu d'apres ces passages. L'idee du 
"rachat de vie" etait familiere a I'evangeUste, 8 37.' Why not 'familiere 
k Jesus' ? It is His words which are quoted in 8 3^ 



THE MESSIAH AND THE CROSS 305 

one and many — the one Righteous Servant and the many 
whom He justifies and whose sins He bears at the cost of 
giving His Hfe for them (Is. 53 ^^'^^). The ideas of the 
passage, therefore, present no antecedent difficulty: they 
are ideas which lie at the heart of the ancient religion. 
Further, there is nothing incongruous, nothing which 
makes us feel that we have risen (or sunk) to another plane 
of thought, when these ideas are treated as if they were 
continuous with that of service. They reaUy are con- 
tinuous; they are naturally regarded by the Speaker as 
indicative of the supreme service which the many need and 
which He must render. He served them in numberless 
ways, but it was not inconsistent with any of these ways, 
it was only carrying service to its utmost limit, when He 
gave His life a ransom for them. It is quite true that the 
disciples cannot do the same service. Our lives have no 
such virtue in them as His sinless life, and cannot be prized 
at such a price. Nevertheless, we must follow Jesus in 
doing service even to this limit: 'We also ought to lay 
down our lives for the brethren ' (i John 3 ^*) . If, now, 
there is no objection on these grounds to Jesus having 
uttered the words here put into His lips, the only ground 
on which they can be rejected is that they imply a con- 
sciousness, on the part of Jesus, of His own relation to 
the ideas they convey, which is inherently incredible. 
The ideas, it must be admitted, were in circulation, and 
the subsumption of them under the general conception 
of service is entirely appropriate; all that can be disputed 
is that Jesus made the apphcation of them to Himself. 

This, it may confidently be said, can only be main- 
tained against the total impression which the representa- 
tion of Jesus in the gospels makes upon us. Jesus is 
not a prophet, He is to His own consciousness the Messiah, 
the Person through whom prophecy is to be fulfilled and the 
Kingdom of God established. To establish God's King- 
20 



3o6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

dom is to do the supreme service to humanity, and just as 
we have seen Him already declare His sole adequacy to 
the task when it is conceived as the revelation of the Fa- 
ther (p. 239), so here we find Him declare His adequacy 
to it again when it is conceived as the ransoming of for- 
feited lives by the surrender of a life worth more than all. 
*To understand Him* — as Dr. George Adam Smith has 
said in a memorable page already quoted^ — 'it is sufficient 
to remember that the redemptive value of the sufferings of 
the righteous, an atonement made for sin not through 
material sacrifice but in the obedience and spiritual agony 
of an ethical agent, was an idea familiar to prophecy. 
It is enough to be sure, as we can be sure, that He whose 
grasp of the truths of the Old Testament excelled that of 
every one of His predecessors, did not apply this particular 
truth to Himself in a vaguer way, nor understand by it 
less, than they did. His people's pardon. His people's 
purity — foretold as the work of a righteous life, a perfect 
service of God, a wilhng self-sacrifice — He now accepted as 
His own work, and for it He offered His life and sub- 
mitted unto death. The ideas, as we have seen, were not 
new;- the new thing was that He felt they were to be ful- 
filled in His Person and through His Passion. But all this 
implies two equally extraordinary and amazing facts: 
that He who had a more profound sense than any other of 
the spiritual issues in the history of Israel, was conscious 
that all these issues were culminating to their crisis in 
Himself; and that He who had the keenest moral judg- 
ment ever known on earth was sure of His own virtue 
for such a crisis — was sure of that perfection of His previ- 
ous service without which His self-sacrifice would be in 
vain. ... It is a very singular confidence. Men there 
have been who felt themselves able to say "/ know,^^ and 
who died like Him for their convictions. But He was 

1 Jerusalem, ii. 547 f. See above, p. 266. 



THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY 307 

able to say "/ am. I am that to which prophecy has 
pointed," and was able to feel Himself worthy to be that.' 
Nothing could be truer to the gospel presentation of Jesus. 
The difference between 'I know' and 'I am' is the differ- 
ence between the prophet and the Saviour, between the 
Old Testament and the New; and the passage with which 
we are dealing, though a supremely important instance, 
is only one instance after all of the habitual and charac- 
teristic consciousness of Jesus. If it stood alone, the criti- 
cism which we have been discussing might seem more 
plausible; but careful scrutiny of the words in the light 
of Jesus' self-revelation as a whole lifts them above the 
shadow of a doubt. In regarding Jesus as Redeemer 
at the cost of His life, as well as Revealer of God, the 
consciousness of the New Testament Christian corresponds 
to the consciousness of the Christ Himself. 

The Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem 

(Mark II »-^'') 

The incident we have just examined is closely fol- 
lowed in Mark by another in which also we see how Jesus 
thought of Himself. The circumstances of His entrance 
into Jerusalem were not accidental, so far as He was con- 
cerned. The fourth gospel, indeed, tells us that His 
disciples did not realise at the time what they were doing 
(12^®): only after the resurrection did it occur to them 
that they had unconsciously been fulfilling prophecy. 
But Jesus, it may be said, organised the procession; He 
sent for the ass's colt on which He was to enter the capital 
in lowly state. On His part it is a Messianic act, and 
reveals the consciousness of the King. It is difficult to 
deny that the multitudes who shouted 'Hosanna' were 
without some perception of this, though their ideas of the 
kingship may have differed widely from His. They hailed 
Him as *Son of David,' or thought of the Kingdom He 



3o8 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

was to restore as that of 'our father David' (Mark ii ^®), 
but the humble pomp suggested rather a Prince of Peace 
than the warrior king who had stretched the bounds 
of Israel from Egypt to the Euphrates. In any case, 
however, the triumphal entry is the act of One who iden- 
tifies His own coming with the coming of the Kingdom of 
God. 'Son of David' may be a misleading description 
of the Messiah, but it is with the consciousness of being 
the Messiah that Jesus here passes before us. 

The Wicked Husbandmen 

(Mark 12 '-'^) 

Of the various utterances of Jesus in Jerusalem, the 
one which is first reported by Mark is not the least im- 
portant to our argument. It is usually called the parable 
of the wicked husbandmen, but it is not really a parable, 
like those which we find in the thirteenth chapter of 
Matthew, but an allegory. A parable is independent of 
its interpretation and application; the parable of the 
sower, for example, describes what happens in Nature 
every year, whether we can discern its spiritual teaching 
or not. But it is otherwise with allegory. Allegory 
only comes into existence through the application which 
is to be made of it: to take the case before us, no pro- 
prietor and no husbandmen ever really acted as the 
proprietor and the husbandmen are here represented as 
doing. The story has no truth of its own: it is only 
the relations of God and Israel which are represented in 
this artificial form. This cannot be disputed, but the 
confidence with which it is inferred that the words are 
not those of Jesus is more than the writer can understand. 
Julicher, for example,^ while admitting that Jesus on ex- 

^ Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, ii. 385. Cf. Loisy, ii. 319: 'Comme beau- 
coup d'allcgories, celle-ci n'a qu'une valeur de conception theorique et 
theologique.' The theology, of course, is that of the Church, not of Jesus. 



THE SERVANTS AND THE SON 309 

ceptional occasions may have used allegory, not parable, 
cannot avoid the suspicion that this 'parable' is due to 
a believer of the first generation, who, in dependence on 
Isaiah, chapter 5, and on parables of Jesus to which he 
already gave an allegorical interpretation, is seeking to 
justify the death of Jesus to the religious sense. It is the 
last and highest proof of God's patience, and must be 
immediately followed by judgment. The whole, he thinks, 
shows us how the history of Israel was regarded by the 
average man who had seen the crucifixion of Jesus and 
yet believed in Him as Son of God. It is a piece of early 
Christian apologetic in which we see how the Christian 
consciousness answered, partly to itself, partly to Jewish 
attacks upon it, the difficulties presented by the death of 
its Messiah. In a similar line the passage is criticised by 
Loisy and many others. 

There are, however, serious objections to this whole 
mode of treatment. To begin with, there is no reason 
why Jesus should not have used allegory as well as para- 
ble. We may be quite right in thinking that it is an 
inferior literary genre, but it is not used here for literary 
but for practical purposes, and what was done by Isaiah, 
Ezekiel, and the Psalmists, may quite well have been 
done by Jesus too. Further, if this allegory had been 
the work of an early Christian apologist, there are two 
points in which it would almost certainly have been 
different. The drastic statement in verse 9 — 'He will 
come and destroy the husbandmen and give the vine- 
yard to others' — would have been qualified. This answers 
to Jesus' conception of the destiny of Israel or her rulers, 
and of the Kingdom of God (cf. Mark 13 2), but not to 
that which we can see from Acts prevailed among the 
early Christians. They had no such sense as He of what 
Israel had forfeited by rejecting Jesus, and of what a 
complete breach had thus been made between the past 



3IO JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

and the future in the history of the true religion. This 
is one point: the other is that a Christian who invented 
such an allegory to justify the death of the Son would 
hardly have left Him dead. He would have contrived to 
introduce somehow the resurrection of Jesus, and His 
entrance into His inheritance in spite of the murderers. 
It may be said that he does this, in such vague fashion 
as his literary method admits, in the quotation from the 
ii8th Psalm — 'The stone which the builders despised, 
the same has become head of the corner; this is the Lord's 
doing, and it is wonderful in our eyes'; but even if this be 
admitted, we have still to ask why Jesus should not have 
spoken thus Himself. In point of fact, the whole plausi- 
bility of criticism like this depends on the insulation of 
the passage, and on the legitimacy of treating it as if it 
stood alone. But it cannot legitimately be treated thus. 
The Jesus who is represented as speaking in it is the 
Person whose unique consciousness of Himself and of 
His relation to God and His Kingdom has already been 
revealed in ways that cannot be disputed. As the des- 
tined Messianic King, He is the Person in whom Israel's 
history culminates, and it was as certain to Him as pro- 
phecy and experience and divine insight could make it, 
that for Him the history must culminate in a great tragedy. 
He was the Son, coming after all the servants, but destined 
to drink a more awful cup, to undergo a more tremendous 
baptism than they. Not that this was the last reality in 
His consciousness: the resurrection which annulled death 
always lay beyond, and He lifts His head in triumph as 
He points to it in the words of the Psalm. Nor can we 
say that an allegory like this is a proper enough thing to 
write, a good subject for private meditation, but that it 
is not suitable in a concio ad populum: no one could see 
its bearings. The evangelist expressly tells us that it 
hit the mark when it was spoken (ver. 12). 



DAVID'S SON AND DAVID'S LORD 311 

But how extraordinary, when we take it as the utter- 
ance of Jesus, is that conception of Himself and of His 
place in the designs of God which it reveals. All God's 
earlier messengers to Israel are servants; He is not 
servant but Son. He is not a Son, but the one beloved 
Son of the Father el?, a^a;nyrd9, ver. 6) ; He is the heir 
— all that is the Father's is His. To send Him is to 
make the final appeal; to reject Him is to commit the 
sin which brings Israel's doom in its train; yet even 
His rejection by Israel is not for Him final defeat. God 
will yet exalt Him and put the inheritance into His hands. 
In the circumstances of the moment it was inevitable 
that Jesus should reflect upon God's dealings with Israel 
and His own place in them; and it is no objection to His 
reflections to say that they represent the mind of Chris- 
tians generally, who knew He had been crucified yet 
believed Him to be the Son of God. He believed Him- 
self to be the Son of God, and when He read the history 
of Israel in His filial consciousness it unfolded itself to 
Him as we see it in this allegory. The stupendous thing 
here, in harmony though it be with His self-revelation as 
a whole, is the place which He assigns to Himself in the 
story. It justifies the attitude of the New Testament 
towards Him, but it is gratuitous to say that it is the pro- 
duct of that attitude. The converse is the fact. 

David's Son and David's Lord 

(Mark 12 25-37) 

No critical difficulty is raised about this passage, and 
the theological discussions to which it has given rise 
hardly concern us. It will be universally admitted that 
in the mind of Jesus * son of David ' was at least an inade- 
quate description of the Messiah. David might have 
many sons by natural descent, but as only one of them 
could be the Messiah, it must have been something dis- 



312 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

tinct from natural descent which gave Him his title. 
No doubt those who hoped for the coming of the son of 
David meant by the term one who would inherit all that 
David represented to a patriotic Jew — a hero king who 
would restore the national independence and empire. 
To Jesus this was as insufficient a title to Messiahship 
as physical descent itself. Whether He repudiated the 
physical descent as He repudiated the poHtical ambitions 
need not be discussed: what is clear from the passage 
as a whole is that, in the mind of Jesus, Messiahship 
depends not on a relation to David, but on a relation 
to God. How this relation is conditioned, physically or 
metaphysically, we are not told; but the Messiah is the 
person to whom God says, 'Sit on my right hand, till I 
make thine enemies the footstool of thy feet.' Jesus did 
not discuss questions of this kind at random: His inter- 
est in the current ways of conceiving the Messiah was 
connected with the fact that He was Himself fulfilling 
the Messianic vocation. Of all Old Testament passages, 
that which is most frequently referred to in the New is 
the opening verse of Psalm no, with its mention of the 
right hand of God; and this way of representing the ex- 
altation of the Messiah goes back, as we see, to Jesus 
Himself. The heavenly voice which spoke to Him at 
the opening of His ministry in the words of one Psalm, 
'Thou art my Son,' speaks in His soul at the close of it 
in the corresponding and, if possible, more exalted words 
of another, ' Sit at my right hand. ' This is an immediate 
inference from the fact that Jesus regarded Himself as 
Messiah. We cannot enter into the elevation which these 
words convey. Even the resurrection of Jesus only im- 
perfectly illustrates them. But they are involved in the 
Messianic consciousness of Jesus, and they justify all 
that Christians mean when they call Him Lord.^ 

' If we limited our view to Jesus' criticism of ' Son of David/ as an 



THE DATE OF THE PAROUSIA 313 
The Date of the Parousia 

(Mark 13 ^') 

We have already referred elsewhere (p. 239) to the 
well-known word in which Jesus declares that 'of that 
day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, 
nor the Son, but the Father.' It is needless to say that 
it has been disputed, but it may be worth while to indicate 
the purely subjective grounds on which this is done. 
When Jesus was asked about the precise date of the 
Messianic advent, He declared roundly, says Loisy,^ 
that this was the secret of the heavenly Father: all He 
could guarantee was that the Kingdom of heaven would 
appear suddenly and unexpectedly; no one would have 
foreseen it, hardly any one would have given it a thought. 
This is set down as the declaration of Jesus, and then 
M. Loisy proceeds: 'In the form which Mark has given 
it, it seems to suggest an apologetic preoccupation, as 
though there were a desire to justify the Christ for not 
having indicated the date of an advent which was clearly 
being delayed, by alleging that according to Jesus Himself 
this was a point of which the angels were ignorant, and of 
which the Messiah might well be ignorant too.' Could 
arbitrariness be more wantonly arbitrary than this ? ' The 
form which Mark has given' to the utterance of Jesus is 
the only form in which we know anything about it; to 

adequate description of the Messiah, we might say that this passage was 
on a level with those belonging to our other early source in which He 
speaks of Himself as 'more than Jonah,' 'more than Solomon,' 'more 
than the Temple' (see p. 250); but the words in which God addresses 
the Messiah, and which it is impossible to leave out of account, lift us to 
a far greater height. One may say this without going as far as Dalman, 
who (referring to Isaiah 49 ^, Jer. i^) thinks it would only be natural that 
Jesus being 'the Son,' as distinguished from all servants, should presup- 
pose, not merely selection and predestination, but also a creative act on 
the part of God, rendering Him what no one, who stands in a merely 
natural connexion with mankind, can ever by his own efforts become. — 
The Words of Jesus, p 286. 

2 Les ^vangiles Synoptiqties, ii. 438. 



314 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

assume that we know what Jesus meant, apart from this, 
and on the strength of this assumed knowledge of His 
meaning to criticise Mark's record of His words, is simply 
unreal. There is something almost naive in the assertion 
that in the circumstances in which Jesus preached the 
gospel it ought to have been enough {devait suffire) to de- 
clare that the date in question was the secret of the Father; 
there was no need to say more than, No one knows 
but the Father.^ Things do not happen in accordance 
with our a priori notions of what ought to be adequate in 
the circumstances; and the real ground on which this 
saying is rejected is unambiguously given in what follows. 
'The use of the term Son, without qualification, to desig- 
nate the Saviour, does not belong to the language of Jesus 
nor to that of the primitive evangelic tradition.' This 
assertion, however, is as unsupported as it is peremptory. 
If we do not know the language of Jesus and that of the 
primitive evangelic tradition through Mark and the other 
document we have examined, we do not know anything 
about it, and this unqualified use of Son is common 
to both (see p. 240). To eject it from both is only pos- 
sible if we reject the historical evidence altogether, and 
proceed on a dogmatic assumption that Jesus cannot have 
been conscious of such a relation to God as this use of 
the term implies. But our whole study of the gospels 
has brought us into contact with a Person whose con- 
sciousness of His relation to God is nothing if not unique; 
and there is no reason, with the evidence of the two most 
ancient sources in our hands, to doubt that on occasion 
He expressed it in this striking way. Nothing, as Schmie- 
del has insisted, was less likely to be invented by men 

' It is rather curious that Dalman, who also rejects the evangelist's 
testimony here, and ultimately on the same grounds as Loisy, thinks 
that the original saying ran: 'Of that day or hour not even the angels 
in heaven know' — the words referring to the Father and the Son being 
added afterwards. — The Words of Jesus, 194. 



THE LAST SUPPER 315 

who worshipped Christ than the statement in this text 
about the Son. Far from serving any apologetic purpose, 
it called itself for defence which Christians were often 
perplexed to give.^ The circumstance that the Son is 
used in it, in a sense which did prevail in the consciousness 
of Christians afterwards, is no evidence that it originated 
there; it only shows again that the consciousness of Chris- 
tians is not unsupported by that of the Christ. 

The Last Supper 

(Mark 14 ''■^') 

Nothing in the gospel, as it was understood by its 
writer, reveals Jesus more clearly than the Last Supper. 
But before proceeding to this involved subject, we may 
refer in passing to the memorable word recorded as 
spoken by Jesus at the anointing at Bethany: 'She hath 
done what she could : she hath anointed My body before- 
hand for the burying. And verily I say unto you, where- 
soever the gospel shall be preached throughout the whole 
world, that also which this woman hath done shall be 
spoken of for a memorial of her' (Mark 14 ^ ^•). We must 
remember that when these words were spoken Jesus' 
death was at hand. He Himself knew it, and though 
probably His disciples generally were far enough from 

' The writer has no doubt whatever that this is a genuine word of Jesus, 
and just as little doubt that it must be taken absolutely as a disclaimer on 
the part of Jesus of all knowledge whatsoever as to the time of the advent. 
To say that one does not know the day or the hour when a great event will 
happen is an impressive rhetorical way of saying that He does not know 
the time at all; and we can easily believe that Jesus used it in this sense. 
It is hardly conceivable that He used it in any other. If it is taken, not 
absolutely, but as a qualification of the sentence that the decisive event 
in question will certainly happen in the lifetime of living men, it ceases 
to be impressive and becomes trivial, not to say grotesque. It is prac- 
tically incredible that Jesus should have said 'All this will happen within 
a generation, but it is not in the power of man or angel, no nor even of 
the Son, to fix the precise date.' But if Mark 13 32 is not to be taken as 
a qualification of Mark 13 3o^ but absolutely and by itself, the probabilities 
are that in spite of their juxtaposition in the Gospel they originally re- 
ferred to different things. 



3i6 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

entering into His mind, there was one person near who 
had divined that they could not have Him long with them, 
and whose heart overflowed in this passionate demon- 
stration of affection. It is Jesus who puts the mournful 
poetic interpretation upon the act of the woman— she 
hath anointed My body beforehand for the burial; it is 
Jesus also, moved by a love so generous, who solemnly 
rewards it with an immortality of renown. The criticism 
is hardly to be envied which finds anything here to ques- 
tion, yet it has become almost a commonplace of criticism 
in a certain school that the last words do not come from 
Jesus, but are the reflection of a Christian preacher. 
One can understand that a Christian preacher in repeating 
them might involuntarily change ' the gospel' (as in Mark) 
into 'this gospel' (as in Matthew) — thinking as he spoke 
of the message which he was actually dehvering — but it is 
not easy to understand how they originated in preaching. 
It may be that Jesus was not ordinarily accustomed to 
speak of 'the gospel' or of 'the whole world,' but the 
circumstances were not ordinary, and He must have had 
means of expressing the ideas (cf. 13 ^^) . Anything which 
suddenly and deeply moved Him seems to have opened 
to His mind the vast issues of His work — the devotion 
of this woman, or the faith of the centurion — which called 
up the vision of the multitudes who should come from 
the East and the West, and sit down with Abraham, Isaac, 
and Jacob in the Kingdom of God (Matt. 8^'). But 
there is a more serious difliculty in the way of ascribing 
this saying to a Christian preacher, and then supposing 
that it has been mistakenly transferred to the lips of Jesus. 
As the word of a Christian preacher it is disagreeable, 
to say the least — a pompous homiletical extravagance, 
having no vital relation to the circumstances; in the lips 
of Jesus and in the historical situation it is Hving, natural 
and sublime — a word of the Lord which needs no attes- 



THE LAST SUPPER 317 

tation, but that it stands where it does, as His word. Who 
could so reward such an expression of devotion, who 
could think of so rewarding it, but He who was touched by 
its passion and challenged to its defence? The common 
sense, not to say the general heart, of man may safely 
be appealed to here against the pedantry in which criti- 
cism sometimes loses its way.^ The interest of this word 
of Jesus for our subject is that it wtually identifies Him— 
perhaps it would not be too much to say that in particular 
it virtually identifies the story of His death — with the 
glad tidings to be brought to all the world. The anointing 
at Bethany is in Mark the prelude to the passion: it is as 
an actor in the opening scene of the great drama of the 
redemption that this woman has a perpetual memorial 
in the Church. This is in keeping with Mark 10^^ and 
with what we shall presently find in the narrative of the 
Supper, but we cannot think this agreement unfavourable 
to its truth. What it does discredit is the idea that in its 
conception of the gospel the . Christian Church entered 
on lines not only unknown to the mind of Jesus but di- 
rectly opposed to it. If the Church was conscious of being 
redeemed through His passion, He was conscious that 
through His passion He became its Redeemer. 

The story of the Supper, so far as we are here con- 
cerned with it, is given in Mark 14^23.. 'And as they 
were eating He took bread, and when He had blessed, 
He brake it and gave to them, and said. Take ye: this 
is My body. And He took a cup, and when He had 
given thanks. He gave to them: and they all drank of it. 
And He said unto them, This is My blood of the covenant, 
which is shed for many. Verily I say unto you, I will no 
more drink of the fruit of the vine, until that day when 

^ A striking illustration in Loisy's remark ad loc. : En faisant dire a 
Jesus que cette histoire aura sa place dans r£vangile, Marc donne ci 
entendre qu^elle n'y a pas toujour s ete. Really ? 



3i8 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

I drink it new in the Kingdom of God. ' ' A much longer 
volume than this would not enable one to describe even 
in outline the critical treatment of these seemingly simple 
words. They purport to be historical, and it is only the 
most 'advanced' criticism which has radically questioned 
their character. This has been mainly done on two 
grounds. First, it is said that on the ground of the general 
character of Mark's gospel, Pauline influence may he as- 
sumed at this point without proof. The Pauline affinities 
of Mark are supposed to be seen in his use of the term 
eoayyUioVi in expressions like that about the Son of Man 
giving His life a ransom for many, and in the frequent 
comments on the inability of the Twelve to understand 
the doctrine of the Cross — the genuine gospel as Paul 
preached it. In the passage before us the mention of the 
covenant, in particular, is alleged to be Pauline: the dis- 
tinction of the old and the new covenant was one of which 
the apostle made much in his teaching, whereas in the 
teaching of Jesus the term covenant does not occur at all. 
To these considerations, jointly and severally, we can 
attach but little weight. We have seen already that 
there is no reason to question, in most of them, the his- 
torical character of what is described as Pauline; and 
it is a violent hypothesis to start from, that what pur- 
ports to be the historical account of a solemn hour in the 
intercourse of Jesus and the Twelve, only found currency 
in the Church — yet did find it universally — in a form so 
pervaded by Pauline ideas, repellant to the Twelve, that 
its historical character may be said to be utterly lost. As 
for the use of the term covenant, we must not forget 
the circumstances of the hour. The Supper had some 
connexion, more or less intimate, with the Passover; and 
that annual sacrifice, which commemorated and ratified 
God's covenant with Israel, would naturally suggest the 

1 See The Death of Christ, pp. 46 ff. 



THE LAST SUPPER 319 

term — ^provided the thoughts associated with it were in 
Jesus' mind at the time. It is important, too, in this 
connexion, not to overestimate the place of the idea in 
the mind of Paul. Apart from the passage (i Cor. 11 ^^ ^') 
in which he gives his account of this same event — a pas- 
sage in which the interpretative word 'new' may be his 
own — there is but one other in all his epistles where the 
same use is found, viz. 2 Corinthians, chapter 3. It is 
precarious, therefore, to argue that its presence here is 
due to him; and while there is no indication in the New 
Testament that the liturgical phraseology connected with 
the Lord's Supper was sacrosanct, it is nevertheless 
thoroughly improbable that an influence originating with 
a man like Paul, who was the centre of such violent 
antipathies, should have moulded every form of it which 
obtained recognition in the Church.^ 

The second ground on which the historical character 
of this passage has been questioned is internal to itself, 
yet does not exclude a reference to Paul. When it is 
closely scrutinised, it is said to betray two minds — two 
currents of thought — two strata of ideas — two 'perspec- 
tives' — which are inconsistent with each other. The 
first is that which is disclosed in ver. 25 : 'Verily I say unto 
you, I will no more drink of the fruit of the vine until 
that day when I drink it new in the Kingdom of God.' 
Here, it is said, we have an utterance in keeping with 
the situation, and entirely intelligible to those to whom it 
was addressed. Jesus does not even speak expressly 
in it of Himself as the Messiah; all he has in view is the 
imminent coming of the Kingdom; it is His adieu to the 
Twelve, and His rendez-vous, the scene of the latter being 
the Kingdom of God; but there is nothing in it about 
His death or His resurrection. The words, like all the 
genuine words of Jesus, maintain the perspective of 

' I do not forget the Didachi, nor the perplexing text of Luke 22 "■20. 



320 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

the near Messianic advent, and this is the token that 
they are really His.^ This is the view of Loisy, who 
admits that while we can see very well how this per- 
spective was broken by what actually happened, it 
is less possible for us to apprehend clearly the manner 
in which faith, after the passion, could derive from these 
eucharistic words the Christian sacrament. It is not 
only less possible, but quite impossible. If Jesus did 
not say a word about His death at the Supper, then an 
ordinance which has its raison d'etre in the proclamation 
of His death cannot by any ingenuity be derived from 
His words. It could not have occurred to Paul any more 
than to anybody else. Paul indeed repudiates in the 
most express terms any suggestion that the ordinance 
of the Lord's Supper, as he had introduced it at Corinth, 
owed anything to Himself. 'I received of the Lord,' 
he says, *that which also I delivered unto you' (i Cor. 
II ^^). There has been some discussion as to what 
exactly Paul means by referring to the Lord as his 
authority here, but surely without much reason. M. 
Loisy argues that he appeals to the Lord rather than 
to the apostohc tradition, because he is conscious, un- 
doubtedly, that he is not merely reporting the fact of 
the institution — his knowledge of which he would owe 
to the tradition in question — but interpreting it at the 
same time in the light which the Lord had given him. 
But the tradition, in what M. Loisy regards as its orig- 
inal form — the only form in which Paul could become 
acquainted with it — is in no sense interpreted in i Corin- 
thians II ^^^-'y on M. Loisy's own showing, it is shunted, 
and replaced by something which has no connexion with 
it whatever. Or if we suppose that a faint echo of it 
remains in 'till He come' (i Cor. ii ^^), this is all that 
remains: the words which Paul gives as spoken by 

1 Loisy, Les Evangiles Synoptiques, ii, 540. 



THE LAST SUPPER 321 

Jesus, Jesus did not speak, and the words which Jesus 
did speak contained no suggestion of those put into His 
lips by Paul. We do not get over these difficulties by 
suggesting that the fusion {melange) of history and of 
Pauline theology in i Corinthians 11 ^^^-j and thereafter 
in Mark, took place spontaneously, in the subconscious 
region of the soul, where dreams and visions are gener- 
ated; and that the apostle presented a vision which he 
had had as a reality, without troubling himself about the 
circumstance that the witnesses of the Last Supper had 
not attributed to Jesus the words which he now put 
into His lips. The vision here, we must remark, is a 
pure hypothesis, excogitated by a modern scholar for 
the support of another hypothesis; and whether it be 
true or not that no one thought in those days of keeping 
two registers of Christian teaching, one for souvenirs 
evangeliques and the other for revelations de V Esprit — 
a point on which, with both gospels and epistles in our 
hands, the very existence of which affirms the distinc- 
tion, we cannot give an unquaHfied assent to M. Loisy 
— it is certain that there is a far simpler explanation of 
Paul's reference to the Lord. It is not the only thing 
of the kind in i Corinthians. The Corinthians, appar- 
ently, were disposed to treat Paul's authority rather 
lightly, and where he can he appeals directly to Christ. 
In the seventh chapter he does so as explicitly as he 
does here: 'To the married I give charge, not I but the 
Lord' (ver. 10): 'Now concerning virgins I have no 
commandment of the Lord' (ver. 25). No one talks 
about visions here: the Lord is referred to as known 
in the apostolic tradition of His words, which, just be- 
cause they are His, are for Christians an authority be- 
yond appeal. It is the same in the account of the Supper. 
The Corinthians were taking liberties with it, pervert- 
ing it into a celebration of their own, as if Paul had 



322 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

instituted it of his own motion, and they might treat 
it as they pleased; and what he says is, It is not my or- 
dinance at all, but Christ's. It is on His authority 
it rests, and in His dying words its significance is de- 
clared. It would be more than extraordinary if, in con- 
ditions like these, Paul wrote to the Corinthians in the 
guise of a historical narrative something which is en- 
tirely destitute of historical value.^ A person who in 
such circumstances could not or did not distinguish be- 
tween matter of fact attested by evidence and visions 
generated in the subliminal self would not be a respon- 
sible person. We have no hesitation therefore in hold- 
ing that Paul reproduces the apostolic tradition at this 
point, and does so in the full sense of its value as a his- 
torical authority connecting the Supper as he observed 
it with the Lord Himself. To say that 'the perspec- 
tive of the Messianic festival excludes the memorial 
of the death,' is obviously to say what the authors of 
the gospels did not feel, what Paul did not feel, what 
readers of the New Testament have never felt. There 
is no reason in the nature of things why Jesus, when 
He ate the Last Supper with His Disciples, should not 
have had both His impending death and His ultimate 
triumph present to His mind, and we need have no 
difficulty in accepting the evidence that He did think 
and speak of both. The references to His body and 
blood do not belong to another stratum of thought, 
inconsistent with that which speaks of drinking the wine 

» Ce serait meconnaitre entiferement I'etat d'esprit des premiers cro- 
yants que de voir dans cette circonstance une impossibilite, comme si 
Paul avait dil rejeter sa vision — that is, the vision imagined for Him by 
M. Loisy — parceque les anciens disciples ne lui avaient pas raconte le 
dernier repas en cette forme, et comme si le recit de Paul, suppose qu'il 
soit venu k la connaissance de Pierre ou de quelque autre temoin, avait 
d<i provoquer un dementi formel, qu'on se serait fait une obligation de 
r^pandre dans toutes les communautes. Loisy, ii. 532 n. i. — The Death 
of Christ, 112 f. 



THE LAST SUPPER 323 

new in the Kingdom of God; they are part of a whole 
which filled His thoughts, and which He revealed in preg- 
nant words to His friends. No doubt they could only 
grasp them imperfectly at the moment, but it is a mistake 
to say that they can only be understood in the context 
of Paul's theology. They could arrest, fascinate, move, 
and stimulate the mind; they were there thenceforth 
with the authority of Jesus for Christian thought to 
brood upon. Without discussing their authenticity fur- 
ther, we have now to ask what light they cast on Jesus' 
consciousness of Himself. 

It is the nature of a symbol that it can be set in different 
lights, and always seems to call for further interpre- 
tation. But from the very beginning, the symbolism 
of the Supper and the words which gave the key to it 
spoke unambiguously to the Christian mind. They 
spoke of Jesus giving Himself, in His body and blood, 
in all the reality of His humanity and His passion, to 
be 'the meat and drink of the soul. They spoke of a 
covenant based on His sacrifice of Himself — not merely 
a bond in which believers realised their brotherhood, 
but a new relation to God into which they entered at 
the cost of His life. They spoke of a transcendent 
kingdom in which all the hopes and yearnings of earth 
would be fulfilled, and in which the Master, who was 
about to die, would celebrate His reunion with His 
followers in a world where death and sorrow have ceased 
to be. We cannot think that less than this was in the 
mind of Jesus when He said, 'This is My body — this 
is My covenant blood — I will drink no more of the fruit 
of the vine till I drink it new with you in the Kingdom 
of God.' But no Christian faith ever put Jesus in a 
more central and commanding place than this. It 
is not a place which can either be taken or shared by 
another; it is all His own. This unique and extraor- 



324 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

dinary place is not only given to him, but taken by 
Him. It is not taken only when it is thrust upon Him; 
it is assumed in the words He here speaks, and in the 
symbolic acts which accompany them, before any one 
has seen what they involve. The experience of the 
Church for two thousand years justifies the self-as- 
sertion, or rather we should say the self -revelation, 
of Jesus in the Supper, but it is not the Church's ex- 
perience which is reflected in the narrative. The same 
wonderful Person whose incommensurable greatness has 
already flashed upon us in this scene or that of the gos- 
pel history here rises as it were to His full stature before 
our eyes, and shows us the ultimate meaning of His 
Presence and His work in the world. The revela- 
tion is one that justifies all that Christians have ever 
felt or said of their debt to Jesus; and it is one of the 
services the Supper does to the Church, that it recalls 
Christians periodically to the things which are funda- 
mental in their faith — the atoning death of Jesus, fellow- 
ship with God through Him, the assurance of immortahty. 
We do not feel it presumptuous to conceive such thoughts 
or to accept them as true; they are in the mind of Christ 
before they are in our minds, and we rest on them as 
realities in Him. 

The Final Confession 

(Mark 14 " 

The trial of Jesus presents many difficulties to the 
historical student, but it is an excess of scepticism which 
would question the one reference to be made to it here. 
As J. Weiss has remarked,* there were ways of knowing 
what took place at the meeting of the Sanhedrin. Jesus 
had at least one adherent there, Joseph of Arimathea; 
and it is simply inconceivable that His friends should 

1 Die Schrijlen des Neuen Testaments, 197. 



THE FINAL CONFESSION 325 

not, after His death, have made the most interested 
inquiries. The grounds of His condemnation must have 
been discussed in Jerusalem between His older followers 
and His enemies, and the evangelists certainly believed 
what they have put on record. That there are dis- 
crepancies in their accounts is indubitable, and that Luke 
in particular does not at this point follow Mark as he 
usually does in narrative, but represents an independent 
tradition, is also, in the opinion of the writer, indubitable; 
but the divergences are for our purpose immaterial. 
According to Mark, the council had considerable diffi- 
culty in finding a ground on which to condemn Jesus. 
'They sought witness against Him to put Him to death 
and did not find it' (14^^). The witnesses lied, and 
were not even coherent or consistent in their lies. The 
most promising were some who asserted that they had 
heard Jesus say, 'I will destroy this temple made with 
hands, and after three days I will build another not 
made with hands' (14^^). The Temple, as the dwelling- 
place of God, was sacred, and to violate it, as Well- 
hausen points out, was still, as in the days of Micah and 
Jeremiah, a blasphemy against God punishable with 
death. But it is quite needless to argue with him that 
this was the blasphemy for which Jesus was condemned, 
and that the reluctance of Christians of the early days to 
admit that Jesus could have said anything disrespectful 
to the Temple led them to misrepresent the truth, and to 
introduce as the ground of condemnation another charge 
— that of claiming to be the Christ — which does not 
involve blasphemy at all. It is not clear what Jesus 
said about the Temple. In Mark 13 ^ He predicts its 
destruction in the most explicit terms; and as both 
Matthew and Luke copy them, early Christians do not 
seem to have been so embarrassed as Wellhausen sup- 
poses. But whatever He had said, the representation 



326 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

of His words by the witnesses was so wanting in con- 
sistency that after all it was found impossible to proceed 
upon it (14^^). The council wished to maintain the 
appearance of legality, and after a vain attempt to get 
Jesus to compromise Himself about the Temple, the 
chief priest took another line. He brought up the Mes- 
siahship of Jesus. This implies that, though Jesus 
was not in the habit of publicly declaring Himself to be 
the Messiah, the idea was somehow or other associated 
with His name: the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and 
the excitement and significant cries which accompanied 
it, are evidence that this was so. We may assume that 
the chief priest, when he said to Jesus, Art thou the 
Christ, the Son of the Blessed? had in view the formu- 
lation of a charge on which Jesus could be arraigned 
before Pilate. The Christ, however qualified, means 
the King; and it was as King of the Jews, a rival to 
Caesar, that Jesus was to be delated to the governor. 
In this character, too. He actually was presented and 
sentenced to die, as the inscription on the Cross proves. 
But His answer to the priest's appeal — or as Matthew 
puts it, to his adjuration — goes far beyond a bare assent, 
* Jesus said, I am, and ye shall see the Son of Man sitting 
on the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds 
of heaven' (14^^). It is as though at the supreme mo- 
ment of His life Jesus fully revealed the secret of what He 
was. 'I am the Christ' means 'I am the promised King, 
He through whom God's purposes are to be fulfilled and 
His sovereignty established; I am the Christ, as the 
future will gloriously declare.' It is needless to argue 
that for the evangelist and his readers the Speaker and 
the Son of Man were one and the same; and the inde- 
pendent tradition in Luke makes it clear that this was so 
also for those who were immediately addressed (Luke 
22^"'^), They perceived that Jesus was making for 



THE FINAL CONFESSION 327 

Himself an astounding, and what they considered, or 
affected to consider, a blasphemous claim, and it was 
on the ground of it that their condemnation of Him 
rested. It is idle to say that there was nothing blasphe- 
mous in claiming to be the Messiah, and that such a claim 
could not explain the action of the council; the council 
was not scrupulous, and this particular Messianic claim, 
made by this particular person, with such threatening 
assurance, might well seem to them the very kind of inso- 
lent impiety to which the name blasphemy belonged. It 
led in fact directly to His death. 

In this self-assertion or self -revelation of Jesus there 
is in a sense nothing new. He has said substantially 
the same thing before (Mark 9^ Matt. 16 2^, Luke 9^'). 
It expresses indeed the consciousness in which He lived 
and died — the sense of Himself, and of His vocation 
and destiny by which the gospels are filled from begin- 
ning ix) end. All that is exhibited in the iioth Psalm 
('Sit thou on My right hand') — all that is exhibited in 
the seventh chapter of Daniel ('the Son of Man,' 'com- 
ing with the clouds of heaven') — is to be fulfilled in 
Him. The sovereignty of God, which means the sov- 
ereignty of the human, as opposed to the brutal and 
unjust, is in Him to have its consummation. The form 
in which this is put has often proved disconcerting; 
Jesus, it is said, has not come with the clouds of heaven; 
and if He were under a delusion about this, can we trust 
His consciousness of Himself at all? Reference has 
been made above to the symbolical element in all such 
language — Daniel 7, for example, is symbolical through- 
out; but it is permissible here to refer to the fact that 
both Matthew and Luke give the words of Jesus with a 
certain qualification. Matthew (26^^) has: Henceforth 
(«7r' aprt) ye shall see the Son of Man seated; and Luke 
(22®^), But from this time {and rod vuv) shall the Son of 



328 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

Man be seated. These qualifications become impor- 
tant when we consider that Luke here represents a tra- 
dition which is independent of Mark, so that he is not 
modifying Mark's record, and that there is no probability 
that he knew anything of Matthew. They suggest that 
from a very early period, a period antecedent to all our 
evangelists, the words of Jesus were current in the Church 
in a form which requires a spiritual rather than a trans- 
cendent interpretation. It is no remote future to which 
Jesus appeals; the fulfilment of His words begins with 
the moment at which they are spoken. His enemies 
think they have expelled Him from the world, but from 
the very moment of their triumph His victory sets in. 
He filled Jerusalem from His death onward as He had 
never done in His fife; it was impossible to escape His 
Presence or His Power; the Council had more to do with 
Him, was made more sensible of His predominance, found 
His challenge more inevitable, in the early days of Acts 
than in the period of the gospel history. Possibly it is in 
this line, which allows for the symbolical character of 
the words, rather than through a literal rendering of them, 
that the meaning of Jesus is to be sought. In any case 
He identifies Himself, in the last solemn utterance of His 
life, with the coming of the Kingdom of God; the coming 
of that kingdom means His own exaltation and return in 
glory; and however we may picture it — may we not say 
reverently, However, in the days of His flesh. He pictured 
it — the certainty of it is one to Him with His very being. 
In speaking as He speaks here, he puts Himself in the 
place which He holds throughout the New Testament; 
that place is given to Him only because He claims it as 
His own. 



CONCLUSION 

We have now completed our examination of the two 
questions with which we started. The first was: Has 
Christianity existed from the beginning only in the form 
of a faith which has Jesus as its object, and not at all in 
the form of a faith which has had Jesus simply as its 
living pattern? and the second: Can Christianity, as 
even the New Testament exhibits it, justify itself by 
appeal to Christ? To both questions the answer must 
be in the affirmative. The most careful scrutiny of the 
New Testament discloses no trace of a Christianity in 
which Jesus has any other place than that which is as- 
signed Him in the faith of the historical Church. When 
the fullest allowance is made for the diversities of in- 
tellectual and even of moral interest which prevail in 
the different writers and the Christian societies which 
they address, there is one thing in which they are in- 
distinguishable — the attitude of their souls to Christ. 
They all set Him in the same incomparable place. They 
all acknowledge to Him the same immeasurable debt. 
He determines, as no other does or can, all their relations 
to God and to each other. While His true manhood 
is unquestionably assumed. He is set as unquestionably 
on the side of reality which we call Divine and which 
confronts man; He embodies for faith that Divine love and 
power which work out man's salvation. It is the place 
thus assigned to Christ which gives its religious unity to 
the New Testament, and which has kept the Christian 
religion one all through its history. And so with regard 

329 



330 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

to the second question. When we look back from the 
Christian religion as the New Testament exhibits it, and 
as it is still exhibited in the Christian Church, to the his- 
torical Jesus, we see a Person, who is not only equal to 
the place which Christian faith assigns Him, but who 
assumes that place naturally and spontaneously as His 
own. Partly the inevitable ascendency which He ex- 
ercised over those around Him, and the unspeakable obliga- 
tions under which He laid them in their life toward God, 
evoked within them the sense of what was due to Jesus; 
but partly also Jesus revealed His consciousness of what He 
was, of what He was doing, and of what He claimed 
from men, in starthng and unparalleled words. The 
resurrection of Jesus, and His consciousness of Himself 
as thus revealed, are at once the guarantee and justifica- 
tion of the historical Christian faith. 

Before proceeding to what seem the inevitable infer- 
ences from this, it may be worth while to refer in passing 
to two objections which are sure to present themselves 
to some minds. On the one hand, there are those to 
whom the questions raised are in their very nature irk- 
some; it seems to them absurd that religion, the higher 
life of the spirit, should be in any way entangled in such 
investigations, or dependent on their results. It must, 
they think, live upon immediate certainties of its own, 
be the answers what they may to questions of the kind 
we have been considering. This mental temper is widely 
diffused. It speaks, for example, in the broad distinc- 
tion which is sometimes drawn between Faith and Knowl- 
edge. 'In Faith,' to quote Goethe as representing this 
view, 'everything depends on the fact of believing; what 
we believe is quite secondary. Faith is a profound sense 
of security, springing from confidence in the All-powerful, 
Inscrutable Being. The strength of this confidence is the 
main point. But what we think of this Being depends 



FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE 331 

on other faculties, or even on other circumstances, and is 
altogether indifferent.' What we are concerned with, 
however, is not faith indefinitely, faith as a profound sense 
of security springing from confidence in a Being of whom 
we know nothing, but faith in a specifically Christian 
sense — that is, faith with characteristics or qualities or 
virtues which are somehow due to Christ. It is idle to 
say that this is independent of what we know of Christ. 
It is Christ known who makes it what it is: we have 
Christian faith only as we believe in God through Him. 
The same criticism is applicable to the famous aphorism 
of Lessing, to which so many have appealed as a way of 
shaking off the spiritual bondage (as they think it) of 
subjection to history: 'accidental truths of history can 
never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.' 
Christianity does not mean the recognition of necessary 
truths of reason, but an attitude of the soul to God, de- 
termined by Christ; and history is not to the religious man 
a chapter of accidents, but the stage on which a Divine 
purpose is achieved which could not be more ineptly 
described than by calling it accidental. Religion can no 
more be simphfied by making it independent of history 
than respiration would be simplified by soaring beyond 
the atmosphere. What we have always to do, after 
making such distinctions as have been illustrated from 
Goethe and Lessing, is to transcend them. Our vital 
convictions, the faiths by which we live, are not formed 
in vacuo; they are generated in us by what has happened. 
If the past is eliminated from the present, the historical 
from the eternal, it is hard to say what is left. The his- 
torical realities which we have been considering — the 
Personality, the Self -consciousness, the Resurrection, the 
growing Ascendency of Jesus — are anything but 'con- 
tingent historical truths.' Whatever we mean when we 
gpe^k of Divine necessity may be predicated of all Al- 



332 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

though Christianity is a historical religion, its saving 
truth is not only in the past; it is here, in the living Christ 
and in the experience of Christians. It has its founda- 
tion laid in historical facts, no doubt; but it has at the 
same time its witness in itself, for the consciences of sin- 
ful men, needing and seeking God. It is the combina- 
tion of the historical fact in the past with its Divine mean- 
ing and relevance in the present, in which the whole weight 
of the evidence lies; and it is the testimony of believers, 
speaking in the power of the spirit, which is used by God 
to make the historical eternal — that is, to make it living, 
present, and divinely strong to save. 

On the other hand, there are those who on critical 
grounds, or what they believe to be such, will demur 
to the answer we have given to the second of our two 
questions. That answer, they will hold, ascribes to our 
gospels a higher historical value than they possess. The 
real way to look at these documents is that which recog- 
nises that they mark stages in a process which began 
with Jesus, but which terminates in the prologue to the 
fourth gospel, or even in the Nicene Creed. This pro- 
cess, which we may call that of idealising Jesus, or repre- 
senting Him in history as acting in the role which He 
fills in Christian faith, was not indeed completed when 
our gospels were written, but it had gone a considerable 
way. It had gone so far, in fact, that the historical 
Jesus is irrecoverably lost to us; we do not know what 
He was, we only know how those who believed in Him 
represented Him to their own minds. The plausibility of 
such statements depends entirely upon their generality, 
and as soon as we come to close quarters with Him it 
disappears. In investigating our second question we 
did not appeal to the gospels without criticism, but to 
the two oldest documentary sources which criticism has 
recognised — Mark, and a non-Marcan source used by 



THE TRUTH OF THE GOSPELS 33^ 

Matthew and Luke. These represent what was believed 
and taught of Jesus in the Christian Church during the 
sixties of the first century. This is a period at which 
many who knew Jesus must have survived, and there 
are sound reasons for believing that the two documents 
named were connected with two members of the apos- 
tolic circle — Mark being indirectly dependent on Peter, 
while the non-Marcan document was probably the work 
of Matthew. Even if we admit the process of idealising 
to be real, these are fair guarantees for a close connexion 
with history. But the process is often exaggerated and 
misconceived. If we start behind all the evidence, with 
an assumed Jesus who is exactly what other men are, of 
course there is an immense amount of idealising to be 
allowed for; everything in short, is idealising — that is, 
everything is imaginary and fictitious — by which Jesus is 
brought into a positive connexion with the Christian 
religion. Obviously this is an unsound mode of arguing. 
Jesus had unquestionably a positive connexion with the 
Christian religion. It owes its being to an impulse com- 
municated by Him. But that impulse cannot have been 
alien to the phenomena which it generated; there must 
have been that in Jesus which was in some kind of keep- 
ing with the idealisation of Him in the Church's faith. 
To admit this, however, is to admit that the Jesus ex- 
actly like ourselves who is assumed to stand behind the 
gospel history, is an illegitimate assumption; if He had 
been no more than we are, the wonder of the Christian 
religion and of the New Testament would never have 
come to be. The necessity of maintaining continuity 
between Jesus and the movement which issued from Him, 
when taken in connexion with the closeness of the wit- 
nesses to the facts, creates a presumption in favour of the 
historical representation of the oldest sources which goes 
far to balance the idealising process referred to. Further, 



334 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

as we have seen already, there is a self-guaranteeing power 
in the inner life of Jesus which assures us we are in con- 
tact with reality in the gospels; the spiritual truth is so 
unquestionable that it carries the conviction of historical 
truth along with it. The mind of Christ, as we have 
come in contact with it in those two ancient authorities, 
does not strike us at all as a product of idealising or 
theologising tendencies in the mind of the Church. We 
know what theology is, we know what poetry is, and the 
most significant utterances in which Jesus reveals Him- 
self have not the character of either the one or the other. 
They are vital, individual, unparalleled. The more 
closely they are studied, the more apparent it becomes 
that they must be taken at their full value if we are to see 
what Jesus was and what place He claimed in the rela- 
tions of God and man. It is well worth observing, too, in 
a matter in which some minds are sure to be impressed by 
authorities, that the two most recent and searching studies 
of this subject by independent scholars have been entirely 
favourable to the historical character of the gospel pic- 
ture, and entirely unfavourable to the idea that Jesus has 
been idealised, or theologised, by the evangelists, past 
recognition. Weiss asserts that the matter contained 
in Q — and Q as he has reconstructed it contains a vastly 
greater proportion of the gospel story than we have ap- 
pealed to — shows no trace whatever of being influenced 
by later Christological ideas; and in this he is substan- 
tially supported by Harnack. Harnack, indeed, thinks 
that Q represents Jesus as dominated by the sense of 
His Messiahship, from beginning to end of the gospel 
story, more strictly than the facts warrant; but the facts, 
as he himself expiscates them from Q's report of the words 
of Jesus, include these: that He who even in His present 
existence is more than a prophet and greater than John, 
He who is the Son, will be the future King and Judge. 



THE TRUTH OF THE GOSPELS 335 

If this was Jesus' consciousness of Himself, as we come 
into contact with it in history, there is clearly room to 
look for wonderful things without discounting them as 
idealising.^ It is indeed not the formal testimonies, in 
which high titles are assigned to Him, which impress us 
most with the sense of what Jesus is. In one place or 
another these may be due to misapprehension, even 
though it is admitted that He sometimes used them. It is 
the informal utterance of His greatness which is so arresting 
and inevitable, and no scepticism can shake our conviction 
that never man spake as this man — about Himself. He 
stands alone, not only in the faith of His followers, but in 
His own apprehension of what He is to God and man. 

It is hardly possible to appreciate these conclusions un- 
less we try to show their bearing on the religious con- 
ditions of the present. No one will deny that there is 
much confusion both within the Church and outside 
of it as to what the Christian religion essentially is. Nor 
is it only evangelic Churches that labour under such 
perplexities. As recent events have shown, even the 
Church of Rome, with all the emphasis it lays upon 
the principles of tradition and authority, is as sorely 
embarrassed as to the proper way of dealing with its 
modernist members, as any of the Protestant communions. 
Such an inquiry as we have just concluded ought to 
provide both the Churches and seeking souls outside the 
Churches with principles to steady themselves by in the 
present distress. 

1 B. Weiss, Die Qiiellen der synoptischen Ueberlieferung, 89. Ein Ein- 
fluss spaterer christologischer Vorstellungen auf die Stoffe in Q ist in 
keiner Weise nachzuweisen. So also, in speaking of what he regards 
as an independent source — which he calls L — and which runs through 
Luke from beginning to end, he says: Auch die Lukasquelle geht nirgends 
ueber die urchristliche Auffassung von der Person Jesu hinaus ib. 80; 
and of Luke as a whole: Die Hauptsache ist, dass von einer irgendwie 
hoher entwickelten Christologie im Lukasevangelium nicht die Rede sein 
kann. Cf. Harnack, Spruche u. Reden Jesu, 169. 



336 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

On the one hand, the conclusions which we have 
reached are entirely reassuring to those who stand in 
the line of historical Christianity. Speaking of it, not 
as a theological system, but as a religious life, Chris- 
tianity has always given to Jesus a supreme place in its 
faith. Christians have lived a life, or have aimed at 
least to live a life, in which all their relations both to God 
and man were determined by Christ. They owed to 
Him all that made their religion what it was: the knowl- 
edge of the Father, the forgiveness of their sins, the new 
life in the spirit, the assurance of immortality. Their 
faith in God was in the proper sense Christian faith, be- 
cause it was in the first instance faith in Him. Now 
this is the conception of Christianity which our investi- 
gation of the New Testament has also discovered, and 
it is a conception which is vindicated when we look to 
Christ Himself as the oldest records disclose Him. Those 
who live in the faith which has just been described live 
in the line of New Testament Christianity, and of the 
mind of Christ about His own place in the relations of 
men and God. They have the same religion as those 
whose spiritual life is reflected in the New Testament. 
Their attitude to Christ is the same, and so is their at- 
titude to God through Christ. This is the point at which 
evangelical Christianity is right, and at which all its pro- 
tests against a broad churchism which would give Christ 
another or a lower place than He has in the New Testa- 
ment faith are justified. It is the point at which evangelical 
Christianity even in the Church of Rome is justified in 
refusing to negotiate with a modernism which by assum- 
ing that Christ cannot possibly have been anything but 
what we are makes the ascription to Him of His supreme 
place in faith impossible. There can be no Christianity 
at all, in the only sense in which Christianity can be seen 
in the New Testament, in the only sense in which it is a 



THE RIGHT OF BROAD CHURCHISM 337 

religion answering to the mind of Christ about His own 
place and calling, unless Christ is established in the place 
which the faith of the Church has always given Him. 
He must have His place because He claims it and be- 
cause it is His due. 

But there is more than this to say. What Christ 
claims and what is His due is a place in the faith of men 
— in other words, it is an attitude of the soul to Himself 
as He is presented to us in the gospel. We are bound 
to Him, in that wonderful significance which He has 
for the life of the soul, that unique and incommunicable 
power which He has to determine all our relations to 
God and man. To be true Christians, we are thus 
bound to Him; but we are not bound to anything else. 
But for what He is and for what He has done, we could 
not be Christians at all: but for our recognition of what 
He is, but for our acceptance of what He has done, and 
our sense of infinite obligation to Him as we realise the 
cost at which He has done it, we could not tell what 
Christianity means. But we are not bound to any man's 
or to any church's rendering of what He is or has done. 
We are not bound to any Christology, or to any doctrine 
of the work of Christ. No intellectual construction of 
what Christ's presence and work in the world mean is 
to be imposed beforehand as a law upon faith, or a con- 
dition of membership in the Church. It is faith which 
makes a Christian; and when the Christian attitude of 
the soul to Christ is found, it must be free to raise its own 
problems and to work out its own solutions. This is 
the point at which 'broad' churchism is in the right 
against an evangelical Christianity which has not learned 
to distinguish between its faith — in which it is unassailable 
— and inherited forms of doctrine which have been un- 
reflectingly identified with it. Natural as such identi- 
fication may be, and painful as it may be to separate 



338 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

in thought things which have coalesced in strong and 
sacred feelings, there is nothing more certain than that 
the distinction must be recognised if evangelical Chris- 
tians are to maintain their intellectual integrity, and preach 
the gospel in a world which is intellectually free. We are 
bound to Christ, and would see all men so bound; but 
we must leave it to Christ to establish His ascendency 
over men in His own way — by the power of what He is 
and of what He has done — and not seek to secure it before- 
hand by the imposition of chains of our forging. 

It is one of the most urgent needs of the Church at 
the present moment to have both these truths recognised 
in their full extent. There can be no Christianity to 
maintain if the evangelical truth is not asserted that 
Christ must have in the faith of men no less or lower 
place than He has had from the beginning, or than He 
Himself, as we have seen, deliberately assumed; but 
there can be no hope of appealing to the world in which 
we live to give Christ such a place in its faith if we iden- 
tiiy doing so with the acceptance beforehand of the in- 
herited theology or Christology of the Church. This 
is not said with any indifference to theology or Chris- 
tology, with any feeling that Christ and His place in 
the world, and especially in the relations of God and 
man, are not worth thinking about. On the contrary, 
there is nothing which is so much worth thinking about, 
nor so certain to stimulate thought if only thought is left 
free. Nor is it said on the other hand with any indiffer- 
ence to the place of Christ: that is assumed to be in- 
disputable from the outset. The problem is to find a 
way of securing the two things: unreserved recognition 
of the place which Christ has always held in evangelical 
faith, and entire intellectual freedom in thinking out 
what this implies. There is no necessary inconsistency 
in the combination; it has been realised in every orig- 



ZINZENDORF AND WESLEY 339 

inal Christian thinker, and the true teachers of the Church 
are one prolonged illustration of it. Not only great 
theologians, but great evangelists like Zinzendorf and 
Wesley have explicitly recognised it. To refer to the 
former. He was, says his biographer, indifferent to 
many things to which the theologians of his time at- 
tached supreme importance; for he believed that all 
who love the Saviour meet in a spiritual unity raised 
infinitely above the barriers erected between the different 
Churches by differences of rite and tradition; and even 
by their errors. 'Although,' he wrote, 'I am and mean 
to remain a member of the evangelical {i.e. the Lutheran) 
Church, nevertheless I do not bind Christ and His truth 
to any sect; whoever believes that he is saved by the 
grace of the Lord Jesus by living faith, that is to say, 
whoever seeks and finds in Christ wisdom, righteousness, 
sanctification and redemption, is my brother; and for 
what remains, I regard it as an unprofitable task, or as 
rather injurious than profitable, to examine what his 
opinions are, or what his exegesis. In this sense,' he 
goes on, 'I admit that it makes no difference to me that 
a man is heterodox — but in this sense only.' ^ Similar 
passages might be multiplied from Wesley. In his 
Journal, under date May 18, 1788, he says: 'I sub- 
joined (to his sermon on "Now abideth faith, hope, 
love; these three") a short account of Methodism, par- 
ticularly insisting on the circumstances — There is no 
other religious society under heaven which requires 
nothing of men in order to their admission into it but a 
desire to save their souls. Look all around you, you 
cannot be admitted into the Church {i.e. the Church of 
England), or society of the Presbyterians, Anabaptists, 
Quakers, or any others, unless you hold the same opin- 

1 F. Bovet, Le Comte de Zinzendorf, 146. The passage quoted is from 
a letter of Zinzendorf, dated June 20, 1729. 



340 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

ions with them, and adhere to the same mode of worship. 
The Methodists alone do not insist on your holding 
this or that opinion; but they think and let think.' No 
one will suspect Wesley of indifference to the place which 
Christ must have in Christian faith, but he was as clear as 
Zinzendorf that this place was one thing, and that the 
theological explanations of it or deductions from it were 
another. It is this distinction between soundness in 
faith — a genuinely Christian attitude of the soul to Christ, 
in virtue of which Christ determines the spiritual life 
throughout — and soundness in doctrine — the acceptance 
of some established intellectual construction of faith, on 
which emphasis needs to be laid. Soundness in faith is 
that on which Christianity and the Church depend for 
their very being; but the construction of Christian doc- 
trine is one of the tasks at which Christian intelligence 
must freely labour, respecting, no doubt, but never bound 
by, the efforts or attainments of the past. 

This, it may be said, is generally admitted, and in 
one sense this is true. It is admitted by individuals. 
The vast majority of the members of the evangelical 
churches occupy practically the position described. They 
are loyal to Christ: their attitude to Him is essentially 
the New Testament attitude; they acknowledge that in 
their spiritual life it is His to determine everything, and 
that they are infinitely and for ever His debtors. But 
to a large extent, and to an extent which increases as the 
mind realises its independence in other regions, and 
cherishes ideals of what science and freedom mean, they 
have lost interest in the traditional theology. It is not 
that they actively disapprove of it or dissent from it, but 
they do not think of it. It is not their own, and they have 
a dim or a clear conviction that anything of this kind, if 
it is to have interest or value for them, must be their own. 
It must be their own faith which inspires it, the action of 



FAITH AND DOCTRINE 341 

their own minds which is embodied in it. It cannot be 
simply lifted, as an inheritance, or submitted to, as a law; 
it must be the free and spontaneous product of an intelli- 
gence energised by faith in Christ. Individual Christians 
understand this, and that is why they sometimes seem 
so indifferent to doctrine. Preachers understand it, and 
try to present to their hearers not doctrines about Christ, 
but Christ Himself — not doctrines about Christ, for 
doctrine always challenges scepticism, and scepticism 
the more searching in proportion as its claim to authority 
is high, but Christ Himself, the sight of whom is the 
supreme appeal and motive to faith. But though indi- 
vidual Christians, and not only those who listen to the 
gospel but those who preach it, are conscious of this 
distinction and accept its consequences, the Churches 
can hardly be said to have done so. They are Christian 
organisations, yet they seem to be based on doctrinal 
statements which most of their members have realised 
are not the actual or the proper basis of Christian life; 
and they not only find it difficult to conceive any other 
basis, but seem to suspect those who speak of another 
of striking at the very heart of the faith. This want of 
accord between the intellectual attitude of the Churches 
acting collectively, and that of their individual members, 
is the cause not only of much discomfort and misunder- 
standing within, but of much scandal and reproach 
without. It seriously discredits the Church in the eyes 
of the world to which it wishes to appeal, and it is ur- 
gent to ask whether there is any remedy for it. 

The responsibilities of a society, it must be frankly 
admitted, are other than those of its individual members. 
It is inevitably more conservative than they; it has to 
guard in some sense what the labours of the past have 
won, and not allow the historical inheritance to be re- 
pudiated or cast away by the juvenile petulance of those 



342 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

who know neither what it means nor what it has cost. 
Christian thought has been at work for centuries on the 
object and the experiences of Christian faith, and it 
would be more than strange if all its toil had been in 
vain. There is a just and proper jealousy of an attitude 
to the past which virtually denies to it the presence and 
the providence of God, and assumes that where it is 
concerned we have everything to teach and nothing to 
learn. This is not at all the attitude which we advocate 
when we urge that the intelligence of the Church in the 
present must be allowed free play. It is the denial of 
this freedom which more than anything else makes men 
unjust to the past. Nothing creates a stronger prejudice 
against a creed, especially if it is of any high degree of 
elaboration, than the necessity of signing it as a con- 
dition of membership or of ministry in the Church. The 
main fact about it in those circumstances — that which 
weighs most upon the mind — is that it is imposed as a 
law upon faith; and the feelings which this infallibly 
engenders are those of resentment and suspicion. It is 
not paradoxical, but the simple truth, to say that the 
influence of documents like the Westminster Confession, 
for example, or even the Thirty-Nine Articles, in the 
Churches which require their office-bearers to sign them, 
would not only be more legitimate but indefinitely greater 
if subscription were abolished. Men would then apply 
themselves freely to these historical expositions of Chris- 
tianity with minds willing to be helped, not in a sus- 
picious temper, or in the attitude of self-defence; they 
would value them more highly and learn far more from 
them; they would not be tempted to strain them into 
meaning what they were not intended to mean, so as to 
make subscription less of a burden to conscience. To say 
this is not to accuse the mind of childishness; it is only 
to recognise facts which every day's experience confirms. 



FAITH AND CHRISTIAN UNITY 343 

In spite, however, of all their responsibilities and ob- 
ligations to the past — in spite of the duty incumbent 
on them to conserve its intellectual as well as its moral 
attainments — the pressure put upon the Churches, both 
from without and from within, to recognise the claims 
of intellectual liberty, is rapidly becoming irresistible. 
Christian people, who are consciously at one in their 
attitude to Christ and in their sense of obligation to 
Him, see that they are kept in different communions, 
and incapacitated from co-operation in work and wor- 
ship, because they have inherited different theological 
traditions to which they are assumed to be bound. With- 
out entering into any discussion of what these theolog- 
ical traditions — call them creeds, confessions, testimonies, 
or whatever else — are worth, they feel in their souls 
that they are not bound to them, and ought not to be, 
with the same kind of bond which secures their allegiance 
to Christ. For the sake of getting nearer to those who 
share this allegiance, and co-operating with them in the 
service of the Lord who holds their hearts, they contem- 
plate with more than equanimity the slackening or dis- 
solution of the bonds which attach them to the theology, 
or, if we prefer to call it so, the Christian thought of the 
past. They will think for themselves as they can or 
must, but the primary necessity, if not the one thing need- 
ful, is the Christian attitude of the soul to Christ, and 
union with all who make that attitude their own. In- 
ternal pressure of this kind is reinforced from without. 
In every country in Christendom the nation has outgrown 
the Church, or has to a large extent passed from beneath its 
influence. Even of those who retain connexion with 
it, frequenting its worship and formally supporting it 
before the world, vast numbers are mentally in that 
strained relation to it which has just been described. It 
is not necessary to diagnose too narrowly the causes 



344 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

which have led to the estrangement from the Church of 
such masses of those who once found in it a spiritual 
home, and still less to suppose that they all lie in the 
region with which we are dealing; but it is certain that 
readjustments must be made here before those who have 
been alienated can be won again. It is certain also 
that before Christians can combine to face with effect 
the problems presented by society to the spirit of Christ 
they must overcome somehow the forces which perpetu- 
ate division among themselves. The important question 
is whether they can find the true principle of union. If 
the conclusions which we have reached are sound, it must 
be a principle which will secure the two ends we have now 
before us — that is, which will bind men to the Christian 
attitude to Christ, but which will leave them, thus bound, 
free to assume and discharge their intellectual and moral 
responsibilities with a conscience acknowledging no au- 
thority but that of the God in whom they believe through 
Him. 

It is very natural that the first steps toward the re- 
cognition of such a principle should be hesitating and 
uncertain. Churches which have inherited complex and 
elaborate creeds — creeds which, though they may be 
called confessions of faith, are not really confessions of 
faith, but more or less complete systems of theology — 
are apt to think that it is in the complexity and elabora- 
tion of their confessions that the difficulty lies. Their 
first thought is that what we need for union among Chris- 
tians is the reduction or simplification of our elaborate 
creeds. Why, for example, it is asked, should we cling 
to the Westminster Confession, a document contain- 
ing hundreds of sharply-defined propositions, about 
many of which there is no prospect of Christians ever 
agreeing? Why should we not recognise that it is hope- 
less to expect union on this basis, and go back to a sub- 



SIMPLIFICATION OF CREEDS 345 

lime and simple formula like the creed of Nicaea ? Would 
not all Christians gather round that? This has not only 
been ventilated as a possibility, but has been definitely 
proposed as the doctrinal basis of union between the Pres- 
byterians and Episcopalians of Australia. 

Plausible as this may sound, it is plausible only to 
those who have never appreciated the nature of the dif- 
ficulty which has to be dealt with. What we want as 
a basis of union is not something simpler, of the same 
kind as the creeds and confessions in our hands; it is 
something of a radically different kind. To simplify 
merely by going back from the seventeenth century to 
the fourth is certainly an easy matter, but what a con- 
temptuous censure it passes on the Christian thought of 
the centuries between. When a man speaks of giving up 
the Westminster Confession for the Nicene Creed, one 
can only think that he has no true appreciation of either. 
The Westminster Confession contains everything that 
is in the Nicene Creed, but the writer has no hesitation in 
saying that this is the least valuable part of what it con- 
tains, and that which has least prospect of permanence. 
The valuable parts of the Confession, those which still 
appeal to the Christian conscience and awaken a response 
in it, are the new parts — those which represent the gains 
of the Reformation revival and the insight into Christian 
truth acquired there; they are the parts which treat of the 
work of Christ and its consequences — of justification, 
adoption, and sanctification ; of saving faith and repentance 
unto life; of Christian liberty and liberty of conscience; 
of Holy Scripture, or the Word of God, as the supreme 
means of grace. To simplify the creed by omitting every- 
thing which can be verified in experience, and then to 
expect men to unite in the purely metaphysical proposition 
— for whatever religious interest it is supposed to guard, 
it is a purely metaphysical proposition — that Christ is con- 



346 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

substantial with the Father, is only to show that one has 
not diagnosed the situation at all. Very few people can 
tell what Athanasius and the Nicene bishops meant by 
this term. No one knows whether all who use it now use 
it in precisely the same sense; or rather, it is as certain 
as anything can be that they do not. Every one feels 
that it is on something else than the understanding of 
such metaphysical propositions that the life and union of 
Christians depend; and it is this something else, and 
not what any one regards as its metaphysical basis or 
presupposition, which ought to find expression in the 
common Christian confession of faith. It is their attitude 
to Christ which Christians have to declare, and Christ 
can only be described in their confession in the character 
which justifies that attitude. He can only be described 
in the simple language of religion. What for theology or 
metaphysics is involved in this is a proper subject for 
theological or metaphysical study; but it ought not to have 
a place, and if Christians are ever to unite it will not have 
a place, in the confession of faith in which they declare 
the attitude of their souls to Him. 

But, it may be said, is it possible to separate in this 
way the Christian attitude to Christ from definite beliefs 
and convictions about Him? Did not He Himself raise 
the question of Christology when He said to His dis- 
ciples, 'Whom say ye that I am?' When we ask men 
to believe in Him, must we not be able to tell them things 
about Him which demand or justify the faith for which 
we appeal? When they ask who then the Person is for 
whom so incomparable a place is claimed, must we not 
be able to tell them in direct and express terms? And 
in particular, it may be said, how is the work of 
Christian education to be carried on? How are 
the immature members of a Christian community to 
be reared in Christian intelligence if there is not 



FAITH AND CREED 347 

some doctrinal system on the basis of which they can 
be catechised ? 

All these are fair questions, and no one could be less 
disposed than the writer to dispute their fairness. What 
they rest upon, in the last resort, is the feeling that the 
Christian attitude to Christ, and a certain type of con- 
victions about Christ, are not unrelated to each other. 
There can be no such thing as a final schism in human 
nature, no possibility of permanently opposing faith and 
knowledge, or of permanently playing off the one against 
the other. The Christian attitude to Christ, and the 
Christian experiences into which men are initiated by it, 
must, in proportion as they are truly apprehended in the 
mind, lead to a body of Christian convictions, or a system 
of Christian doctrine, in which believing men will find 
themselves at one. This is not questioned in the least. 
What is at issue is rather a question of order than of an- 
tagonism: our concern is to see that we lay at the founda- 
tion only what is fundamental, and that we do not present 
to men as the indispensable presupposition of faith what 
is one of faith's last and most difficult achievements. 
When we preach, we must certainly be able to tell men 
things about Christ which justify the Christian attitude 
to Him. But these faith-producing things are not dog- 
matic definitions of His person: they are not doctrinal 
propositions, such as those of the Nicene Creed; nor are 
they less formal expressions of essentially the same charac- 
ter. They are such things as we have been in contact 
with all through our study of the gospels: they are the 
life, the mind, the death, the resurrection of Jesus. If the 
exhibition of these does not evoke the Christian attitude 
of the soul to Him, the soundest metaphysical doctrine of 
His person is worthless. But if the Christian attitude 
is evoked by the revelation of Jesus in the gospel, we have 
found that in which all Christians can unite, and the 



348 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

theological doctrine of His person may be trusted sooner 
or later to come to its rights. But it must not be taken 
out of its proper place and order, nor can we expect it to 
yield us what can only be found in the sphere of faith. The 
questions raised by the Christian attitude to Jesus, and 
the Christian's sense of debt to Him, may have to be 
asked over and over, taking always a wider range, pene- 
trating always more deeply into the wonder of what He 
is and does; and with the widening and deepening of the 
questions the answers too must vary in form. That 
is why we cannot look to these answers, however profound 
or true they may be, to furnish the basis of union among 
Christians. They are always subject to revision, not 
because He changes — He is the same yesterday and to-day 
and for ever — but because men change in their apprehen- 
sion of Him. And in such changes, even though they 
may sometimes be changed to an inferior or less adequate 
conception of Him, we must bear with each other so long 
as the attitude of Christian faith in Him is maintained. 

If we look to the Church of the New Testament age, 
we shall find that this is essentially the situation in which 
it confronts us. As has been demonstrated above, there 
is one religion exhibited in every part of the New Testa- 
ment; from beginning to end, in every writer represented 
in it, there is the same attitude of the soul to Christ. In 
other words, there is one faith. But though there is one 
faith, there is not one Christology. All the New Testa- 
ment writers, it may no doubt be said, have a Christology 
of some kind. Faith always acts as an intellectual stim- 
ulus, and it never did so more irresistibly than in the first 
generation. When Christ constrained men to assume 
what we have called the Christian attitude to Himself, He 
constrained them at the same time to ask who the Person 
was to whom such an attitude was due. He constrained 
them to think what His relations must be to God and 



FAITH AND CHRISTOLOGY 349 

man, and even to the universe at large, to justify the at- 
titude He assumed to them. But though these questions 
stirred more or less powerfully, as they must always do, 
the intelligence of Christians, it is impossible for any 
scientific student of the New Testament to say that all the 
early behevers, or even all who were regarded in the 
Church as divinely empowered witnesses to the gospel, 
answered them in precisely the same way. To take 
only one example, but that the most conspicuous: Paul's 
attitude to Christ is exactly that of other New Testament 
writers, but his Christology is his own. It is not identical 
with that of Peter or John, or, so far as we can discover 
it, with that of Matthew^ or Luke; just as little is it iden- 
tical with that of the Nicene Creed. It does not follow 
from this that it is of no value, or of no authority. The 
great thoughts about Christ inspired by Christian faith in 
Him, as the New Testament illustrates it — thoughts about 
His relations to God, to men, and to the universe — al- 
w^ays tend to reproduce themselves in minds which share 
that faith; and it must be a singularly powerful or soli- 
tary mind which in its Christian thoughts about Christ 
could own no debt to Paul. This is the guarantee we 
have, in a world in which the mind is once for all free, 
that the truth in Paul's thoughts about Christ will never 
be lost. But though it does not follow from what has 
been said that Paul's Christology is of no value, or has 
no authority for us, it does follow that neither his nor any 
other Christology can be the basis of union among Chris- 
tians of which the Churches are in quest. It was not 
Christology in any sense in which Christians were one 
from the beginning, and the Formula Concordiae which 
the perplexed conscience of multitudes in all the Churches 
is at present seeking, cannot be a theological document. 
It must, we repeat, be a declaration which will bind men 
to Christ as believers have been bound from the beginning, 



3SO JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

but which will also leave them in possession of the birth- 
right of New Testament Christians — the right and the 
power of applying their own minds, with conscientious 
freedom, to search out the truth of what Jesus is and does, 
and to read all things in the light of it — the world and God, 
nature and history, the present and the future of man. 

Reserving, then, this right and power, it only remains 
to ask whether we can put the reHgious truth about 
Jesus, the significance which He has for the faith of 
Christians, into words which all who adopt the Christian 
attitude to Him would recognise as the expression of 
their faith. Such words would not be doctrinal or dog- 
matic, in the sense of the Nicene Creed, or of the Augs- 
burg or the Westminster Confession; they would not 
be an utterance the same in kind, but simpler in form, and 
less ambitious in aim; they would be the immediate ut- 
terance of the Christian sense of what faith has in Christ, 
not the speculative or reflective statement — as these other 
documents all are in varying degrees — of metaphysical 
truths concerning Christ which must be admitted if we 
would justify our faith. The truth they embody would 
not be itself a creed, in the sense of a scientific or theo- 
logically defined statement; it would not be the substitute 
for a creed; it would be the inspiration and the standard 
of all Christian thinking. Looking back to the investi- 
gations which we have just completed, and recalling the 
significance which Jesus had in His own mind, and has 
always had in the minds of Christians, it is perhaps not 
too bold to suggest that the symbol of the Churches unity 
might be expressed thus: I beheve in God through Jesus 
Christ His only Son, our Lord and Saviour. 

A few words will explain everything in this which 
requires explanation. The ultimate object of faith is 
always God, but Christian faith in God is faith which is 
determined by Christ, and which would not in any re- 



A UNITING CONFESSION 351 

spect be what it is but for Him. Hence in the most ele- 
mentary Christian confession, faith in God must be 
so described as to bring out this specific character. It 
must be defined as faith in God through Christ. But 
how is the Person to be described who is the mediator 
of this characteristically Christian faith? If we keep 
vividly before us that estimate of Him which pervades 
the New Testament writings, and which, as we have 
seen, can be vindicated by appeal to His own conscious- 
ness of Himself, we shall probably agree that this descrip- 
tion must cover or include two things: first, that the Person 
concerned is to God what no other can be; and second, 
that He is also what no other can be to man. The first 
of these is secured when He is described as the only Son 
of God. We need not hesitate to admit that when we 
speak of God the only terms we can use are symboUc 
or analogical. If the analogies suggested are real, the 
terms are true and valuable. 'Son of God' in ancient 
times w^as used with great latitude of meaning, both by 
Jews and Gentiles; but what it conveys here is that Jesus' 
consciousness of God was truly filial. God was to Him 
Father, and He was to God Son. When we describe 
Him as the only Son of God, what is signified is that in 
that filial consciousness He stands alone in the world. He 
is not, as He conceives Himself and as Christian faith re- 
cognises Him, a son of God, but the Son. He is the Son 
in the same unqualified sense in which God is the Father, 
and when believers are initiated into the filial relation to 
God, it is in and through Him. No metaphysical solu- 
tion or explanation is offered of the fact that Christ is 
to God what no other is or can be; the fact is simply de- 
clared — and if the Christianity of the New Testament 
and of the consciousness of Jesus is to survive it must be 
declared — when he is called God's only Son. The term 
only is the simplest, but an entirely adequate, translation 



352 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

of the unicus and iiovoyevrj^; of the Latin and Greek creeds. 
The second requisite in the description of Christ— that 
He shall be presented as being to men what no other is or 
can be— is secured when He is further designated our 
Lord and Saviour. The first term expresses the unique 
allegiance and loyalty which all Christians acknowledge 
to Christ; the second, the unique debt which they owe 
Him. Taking both together, and in combination with 
the description of Jesus as the only Son of God, it is not 
too much to say that they safeguard everything which is 
vital to New Testament Christianity, that they include 
everything which ought to have a place in a fundamental 
confession of faith, and that they are the only basis of 
union broad enough and solid enough for all Christians 
to meet upon. 

The objections which will immediately arise here in 
many minds are mainly due to prepossessions or assump- 
tions which reflection will lead us to discount. It may 
be worth while to refer to some of the chief. 

It will certainly be urged, to begin with, that no Chris- 
tian confession of faith can omit mention of the Holy 
Spirit. Believers have been baptized from the earliest 
days in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
Spirit. Especially, it may be said, if the union of Chris- 
tians is in view, must we remember that it is dependent 
upon the Spirit; there is one Body only because there is 
one Spirit; and it is the imity of the Spirit which the New 
Testament exhorts us to maintain. The facts alleged 
here are not disputed, and nothing can be further from 
the writer's mind than to minimise their importance. 
Once again it is a question not of antagonism, but of order. 
It is surely much in favour of the type of confession ad- 
vocated above that the New Testament nowhere speaks 
of faith in the Holy Spirit. The apostles preach Christ, 
and call on men to believe on Him; those who respond 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 353 

to the call confess Christ in the character in which He is 
preached, the only Son of God, the Lord and Saviour; 
they believe in Him, and in God through Him; but familiar 
as it is to us through the accepted creeds of the Church, 
such an expression as 'I believe in the Holy Ghost' is 
entirely foreign to the New Testament. What the apostles 
asked was not, Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? but, 
Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed — 
believed, that is, in Jesus? (Acts 19^). It is better, 
in thinking of what is essential to a Christian confession, 
to keep to New Testament lines. The Spirit will have 
its proper place in the interpretation of Christian ex- 
perience; but to introduce the bare term into the primary 
confession, and to present the Spirit as an object of faith 
co-ordinate with Christ, is both to desert the New Testa- 
ment, and to beguile ourselves with an illusion of knowledge 
about the divine nature which has no Christian value. 
As long as the experiences which come to men by believ- 
ing in God through Christ are what they have been, the 
explanation of them from the divine side, as wrought by 
the Spirit of God, will find its due; but apart from this 
explanation, which surely has no proper place in the creed, 
there is no caU to allude to the Spirit. 

It is no unimportant confirmation of this view that 
the historical creeds of Christendom all betray a certain 
degree of embarrassment in their treatment of the article 
on the Spirit which they nevertheless agree to introduce. 
The most ancient, the 'Apostles" Creed, has definite 
affirmations to make about the Father and the Son, but 
when it comes to the Spirit it has not a word to add. The 
Nicene Creed had originally the same form at this point: 
it ended with the words, 'and in the Holy Ghost.' The 
Constantinople text, which dates from 381, ventures on 
expansion : ' (I believe) in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and 
Giver of Life; who proceedeth from the Father [and 
23 



354 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

the Son]; who with the Father and the Son together is 
worshipped and glorified; who spake by the Prophets.' 
The haphazard and incongruous character of these ad- 
ditions needs no comment. In reahty, the proper ex- 
pansion of the article on the Spirit — that in which the 
meaning of 'the Spirit' is discovered — is to be found in 
the latter clauses of the Apostles' Creed : it is in the exist- 
ence of the Church as the fellowship of believers, in the 
consciousness of forgiveness and in the assurance of im- 
mortality, that the Spirit is real^ an object of knowledge 
and experience to believers : apart from these experiences, 
we could not even know, there was any such thing. Even 
one who has every disposition to make the most of tra- 
ditional Christian thinking, and who heartily agrees that 
no one knows all that a Christian means by 'God' unless 
he includes in the term all that is meant by ' Father, Son, 
and Holy Spirit,' may on grounds like these be con- 
vinced that every Christian interest is secured by the 
simple confession suggested above. And what is also 
of much importance, the one thing needful, the Christian 
attitude to Christ, is not compromised by being set on 
the same level with something which has not primarily 
the same character at all. 

Another objection, not quite unlike this in principle, 
is that the confession proposed is too indefinite. Almost 
any one, it will be said, might adopt it. It could be made 
by an Arian as well as by an Athanasian. No one who 
has assented in any degree to the argument of this book 
will be puzzled by this objection. The confession which 
is here advocated as a sufficient basis for the unity of the 
Church could not be made by any one; it could only be 
made by those who take up what the most careful inves- 
tigation has shown us to be the Christian attitude to Christ, 
and it can be no part of our intention to exclude any such 
from the Church. The differences which we associate 



ARIAN AND ATHANASIAN 355" 

with the names Arian and Athanasian are differences 
which emerge in another region than that in which we 
confess our faith in Christ — in an ulterior region; and 
all such differences, where the Christian attitude to 
Christ is maintained in the sense which we have already 
made clear, must be dealt with by other means than ex- 
communication. Arianism and Athanasianism both give 
answers to a question which multitudes of genuine Chris- 
tians never ask. Once it is asked, the mind must be 
allowed to find the answer to it freely. One may be con- 
vinced, as the writer is, that the Arian answer is quite un- 
real, and as convinced that the Athanasian answer explains 
nothing. It is not on the answer at all that a man's 
Christianity depends, but on something antecedent even 
to the question; and it is this antecedent something — 
the believing Christian attitude to Christ, and the sense of 
Christ's unique place as determining all our relations to 
God — it is this, and not the metaphysics of Christ's 
Person, which alone is entitled to a place in the creed. 
If we wait for unity in the Church till all Christians ac- 
cept the same Christology, we may as well give up the 
thought of unity at once. 

Many minds will, regard it as a more serious objection 
to the proposed confession that it ignores much which 
it has been customary to identify with Christianity, 
and which they would be inclined to affirm with emphasis 
just because it is so often called in question. 

Thus it makes no mention of the supernatural birth of 
Christ: it has nothing corresponding to the clause in the 
Apostles' Creed, 'conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of 
the Virgin Mary.' The answer to this would be on the 
same line as that to the objection that there is no sep- 
arate mention of the Spirit. It is not intended at all to 
dispute the Virgin birth. Everything that we have 
seen of Christ in the course of our study, every impres- 



356 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

sion that has been made on us of His solitary greatness 
and of His unique relations to God and man, is con- 
gruous with a unique presence and operation of God 
at His entrance into the world, and adds to its credibility. 
No purely historical evidence will ever make the super- 
natural birth of Christ credible except to a mind which 
has already, on independent grounds, surrendered to the 
impression of the supernatural in His Person. No one can 
deny that it is possible so to surrender. All through the 
earliest records, as we have seen, Christ reveals Himself 
to men, by word and deed and influence, in that character 
and greatness which demand and evoke faith; He reveals 
Himself as the only Son of God, the Lord and Saviour of 
men, and wins recognition and devotion in that character; 
but He does so without making the faintest allusion any- 
where to the manner in which He came into the world. 
It is easy to find reasons why He should not have done so, 
even assuming that the gospel narratives of His birth are 
true; but that does not alter the fact that without dis- 
closing the secret of His origin at all Jesus sought and 
found faith from men. It was the same after He left 
the world. As has been pointed out above (p. 14), 
the gospel rested on the apostolic testimony to Jesus, 
and the testimony did not reach so far back as His birth. 
It covered only the period within which Jesus was mani- 
fested to Israel — 'beginning from the baptism of John 
until the day when He was taken up' (Acts i^^). We 
cannot go wrong if we limit the fundamental confession 
of faith to the character in which Jesus presented Him- 
self and was afterwards by His apostles presented 
to the world, without introducing into it, as essential 
conditions or presuppositions of faith, matters of fact 
which originally had no such significance. The ques- 
tion which Jesus asks, and which is of vital importance, 
is Who say ye that I am ? not, How think ye that I came 



THE RESURRECTION 357 

to be? No doubt the two questions must be related 
somehow, but happily it is possible to answer the first, 
by assuming the Christian attitude to Christ, while the 
other remains in abeyance; and all that is urged here 
is that this- ought to be recognised in the confession of 
the Church. 

Other two objections, which would be serious if they 
were well founded, must also be referred to. The first 
is, that no mention is made of Christ's resurrection. 
This is a misunderstanding. Christ's resurrection is 
assumed when we confess our faith in Him as Lord. 
We do not believe, in the sense of having religious faith, 
except in a living person, and the term Lord expresses 
our assurance that the Person in whom we believe not 
only lives but reigns. This does not answer every ques- 
tion raised by the resurrection; indeed there may be many 
questions in this region which it is beyond our power to 
answer. We may never be able to define the relation of 
the crucified body of Jesus to the body of His glory, to 
picture the process by which the one was transformed 
into the other, to rationalise the relations of the two modes 
of being. We may never even be able to estimate with pre- 
cision the meaning or the value of the New Testament 
evidence at any given point. But the soul which believes 
in the exaltation of Jesus as Lord can safely be left to 
the free and reverent exercise of intelligence on such 
points. 

The other objection, which would be equally serious 
if it were true, is that no mention is made of the atone- 
ment. If by the atonement is meant the doctrine that 
there is a peculiar connexion between the death of Christ 
and the forgiveness of sins, then it may be noted that 
in this respect the brief confession of faith which we 
have in view is at one with the so-called oecumenical 
creeds. There is no mention of the atonement either 



358 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

in the Apostles' Creed or in that of Nicaea. But the 
objection really rests on a misapprehension. When we 
confess our faith in Christ as Saviour, it can only mean 
that we owe to Him our reconciliation to God, the for- 
giveness of sins, the power of a life like His own. But 
these are the very things with which the doctrine of 
atonement deals. It is an attempt to understand how 
Christ achieves these blessed results for us — what He 
does and suffers, and why it is necessary that He should 
do and suffer so wonderfully to achieve such results. It 
is an attempt to understand the cost of our salvation to 
Christ, and to God in Christ. In so far as that is sum- 
marily comprehended in His death it is an attempt to 
understand the death of Christ as something deter- 
mined by and doing justice to all the relations of God and 
man as these had been affected by sin. It is the central 
doctrine of Christianity, the deepest, the most vital, 
the most difficult; but it is raised by the believer's ex- 
perience; it is not, as a developed doctrine, the condi- 
tion of his faith. No doubt, when we think things to- 
gether, a certain experience of salvation wiU lead to a 
certain construction of the work of Christ; but every- 
thing in its own order. The Christian consciousness of 
being indebted to Christ for salvation — of owing Him 
what we can never repay — must find a place in every 
confession of faith; and it does so when we call Him 
Saviour. The more we realise what it cost Him to 
save, the stronger will be the appeal we can make for 
faith; great evangelists like Paul and Luther, Zinzen- 
dorf and Wesley, magnified the atonement as the very 
heart of the gospel, and delivered it to sinners 'first of 
all.' But every Christian interest is secured by a con- 
fession which ascribes to Christ and to Christ alone 
the salvation of men. What it cost Him to save can be 
celebrated in doxologies, declared in preaching the gos- 



CONCLUSION 359 

pel, explored by devout Christian philosophy; in the Creed 
it is sufficient to describe Him as our Lord and Saviour. 
In all this, it is needless to say, there is no idea of 
rediscovering the gospel, or of disparaging theology. 
But the state of mind around us, both within the Church 
and without, seemed to make it necessary to point out 
the bearing upon present conditions of the conclusions 
to which our investigations led. The Christian religion 
has never existed except as a religion giving Christ a 
place which is all His own in its faith; it has never ex- 
isted except as a religion in which Christ was both to God 
and to man what no other could be, and determined all 
their mutual relations. Moreover, Christianity in this 
form is not discredited but vindicated when we test it by 
appeal to the consciousness of Christ. It only gives Him 
the place which He assumes as His own. It is the same 
religion, consistent with itself and with the consciousness of 
Jesus, all through the ages; and what we need for that 
mutual understanding of Christians, which is itself so 
urgent in view of the present distress, intellectual and spir- 
itual as well as material, is the clear perception of this 
truth, and of its necessary consequences. We can all have, 
with a clear intellectual conscience, the same religion — the 
religion preached by the apostles, and answering to the 
self-consciousness of Jesus — the religion in which Jesus 
holds the place He has held from the beginning, the only 
place He ever consented to hold — the religion in which 
we recognise Him as the only Son of God, our Lord and 
Saviour: we can all have the same religion — provided that 
the intellectual questions it raises are left for the free 
consideration of Christian intelligence. We cannot lift 
the answers to these questions, ready made, from any 
source; not even from the New Testament. The mind 
which asks them is the only one that can answer them; 
gijid if it cannot answer them for itself, they remairi for it 



360 JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 

unanswerable. This does not mean that one mind can- 
not help another, but that every mind is independent, and 
can only be helped by what recognises and confirms its in- 
dependence. The thoughts of the apostles, whose minds 
were first powerfully stimulated by their faith in Christ, 
will always be a help, and the supreme help, to Christian 
thought; in some sense they will always be a standard for 
Christian thinking; but they help us by inspiring in us 
an intellectual interest in the gospel answering to their 
own, not by imposing their thoughts authoritatively upon 
us as a law to our faith. There is no reason to fear that 
the frank recognition of this — with its corollary, the aboli- 
tion of subscription to theological creeds, such as now 
prevails in most churches — would imperil the gospel, or 
any Christian interest. On the contrary, it would con- 
centrate interest where it ought to be concentrated. It 
would keep the religious significance and claims of Chris- 
tianity in the forefront, and these, though in no sense 
opposed to, are nevertheless distinct from, its theological 
presuppositions or problems. A church, it may be said, 
must always have some security that those whom it puts 
in places of responsibility — those, especially, whom it 
entrusts with the duty of teaching, or of representing its 
convictions before the world — are really in essentials at 
one with it. This is true enough, but the essentials, as 
we have tried to show, are covered by such a non -theological 
confession of faith as has just been proposed. It is not 
the signing of a creed which keeps men true to their re- 
ligion, but something quite different. The men who drew 
up the confessions which we sign could not themselves 
sign them before they were drawn up. The Church 
which set them to their task might properly ask them to 
declare their loyalty to the common faith; but this done, 
they had no further responsibility to men. 'I, A. B,^ 
— ^so each of the Westminster divines gave his hand as he 



CONCLUSION 361 

joined the Assembly which drew up the Westminster 
Confession — 'do seriously promise and vow, in the pres- 
ence of Almighty God, that in this assembly whereof 
I am a member, I will maintain nothing in point of doc- 
trine but what I believe to be most agreeable to the word 
of God; nor in point of discipline, but what may make 
most for God's glory, and the peace and good of this 
Church.' A solemn pledge of this kind, added to such an 
unreserved recognition of Christ's place in the relations 
of God and man as has been the characteristic of Chris- 
tian faith from the beginning, and as is covered by the form 
suggested above, is surely all that any Church can wisely 
ask from its ministers. To adopt this course would do 
more than anything to meet the intellectual crisis in the 
Churches. It would bring an immense moral relief to 
many who are in the Church. It would remove obstacles 
which keep many outside of it. It would restore its self- 
respect and its honour in the eyes of the world. It would 
provide the only reasonable intellectual basis for union. 
And it would not imperil the Christian relation to Christ. 
Faith lives on in the world because Christ is perpetually 
revealed in the character and greatness which originally 
commanded it. We believe in Him as Son of God, as 
Lord and Saviour, because it is so only that He manifests 
Himself to us, and the consciousness that our faith raises 
numberless questions which we may never be able to 
answer does not shake its security or diminish its power. 
It is not open or unanswered questions that paralyse; 
it is ambiguous or evasive answers, or answers of which 
we can make no use, because we cannot make them our 
own. And it is not the acceptance of any theology or 
Christology, however penetrating or profound, which 
keeps us Christian; we remain loyal to our Lord and 
Saviour only because He has apprehended us, and His 
hand is strong. 



INDEX OF NEW TESTAMENT 
PASSAGES 



Matthew 



1^ 


. 55 


2 15. 18 


. . 56 


3 i» «• 


. 177 


3"f- . 169, 


178, 179 n. 


3" 


179 w. 


4 i~i* 


186 £F. 


423 ] ; 


- 52 


5-7 


214 ff. 


5" 


. 217 


51^ . , 


. 215, 219 


5" . . 


- 255 


5'' . i 


J05, 220, 303 


5 21 «• 


. 217 


5 39 f . 


. 217 


6 18 «. 


. 281 


7" 


. 221 


7 21 «• 


222 ff. 


8 5 «. ! ! 


. 226 


8^0 


. 316 


8^^ 


. 260 


9» 


. 274 


9« . , 


205, 220 


9^ 


- 52 


10 


192 ff. 


10" 


. 198 


10 1« 


. 199 


10 17 ff. . 


. 196, 199 f. 


10^2 


- 297 


10s2ff. . 201 


, 203, 213, 


219 f. 2 


56, 264, 303 


10 "f- 


209, 295 



Matthew — continued. 




PAGE 


10^9 . 20c 


3, 210 f., 216 


10^ 


. 234 


11 2-i« 


. 228 ff., 281 


11 5 


. 271, 273 


11 12 f- 


• 235 


11 " 


• 235 


llief. . 


. 237, 258 


11 20 ff. . i 


231,247,271 


ll25ff. . 


237ff. 


12« 


. 249 


12 24-^ . 


. 283 


12 27 f. 


. 248 


12 28 


. 284 


12 29 


. 187 


12^0 


247 ff. 


12 '2 ^ 3 


[54, 248, 262 


12 35 f. . 


. 222 


12 40 


. 261 


12 41 f. . 


. 249 


12 46 ff. . 


- 205 


15 1 «. . 


. 281 


16 i« 


. 194 


16 24 ff. . 


. 294 


16 25 


. 211 


16 27 


. 203, 225 


16 2« 


. 327 


18 « .2 


527, 234, 297 


19 2« 


194, 300 


19 29 


- 297 


20 19 


299 w. 


20 2« 


. 220 



363 



3^4 



JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 



Matthew- 



21 23 ff. 

22 2 

23 34 ff . 
24 » 

24 1* 

24 27, 37, 39, 

25 31-48 

26 1' 

26 31 f • 
26^2 

26 «^ 
28^ 
28 9 f- 
28 1° 
28 i« «• 
28 ^« 



1^ 

12 
I2f. 

1^ 
;[ 9-11 

1 12 f. 

1" 

1 16 ff. 

1 29 ff. 
21-12 

2 10-28 
217 

2 18-20 

2 28 

3 13-19 
317 

3 20f. 

327 

3 28 ff. 

3 31 ff. 



-continued. 

PAGE 

. 228 
. 282 

251 ff. 

200, 297 

52 

264 
192 

225 
52 
133 
134 
327 

138 

133 

i33» 135, 139 
. 238 

Mark 

52,54,179^. 

- 233 

• 54 
. 179 

177 ff. 

186 ff. 

52,192 

159, 271 

• 159 
271 ff. 

- 256 

- Z^Z 
279 ff. 

- 273 
192 ff. 
. 194 
. 205 

- 154 
. 187 

263, 283 
. 205 



Mark — continued. 



4 10 

g7-ll 

6" 

6 45f. 

7 Iff. 

7 31 ff . 

8 22 ff . 
8 27 ff . 
8 29 ff . 
8 31 

8 34-91 
g35 
8 37 

8 38 

8 "-10 
910 

9 30 ff . 
931 
932 

9 33-50 
935 
939 
940 
941 
942 

10*7 

10 29 
10 32 
10 32-45 

10 33 

10^5 

11 1-1« 
11" 

11 27 f. 

12 1-12 

12 35 ff. 
132 

13 3 ff. 

13 » 



.1 



PAGE 

. 194 

193, 196 

. 198 

- 285 

281, 286 

169 

169 

53, 286, 307 

. 159 

. 292 

- 294 
. 211 

. 304 
162, 172, 203 
62 ff., 172 f.,284ff. 

- 327 
291, 293 

. 291 
. 292 
. 299 
296 ff. 
. 194 
. 297 
. 248 f. 
. 297 
. 227 

- 154 

• 297 
. 194 
298 ff. 
. 292 

53,162,303,317 

307 f- 
. 194 
. 228 

308 f. 

• 311 
310,325 

- 159 
200, 297 



INDEX 



365 



Mark — continued. 

PAGE 

196 

55,316 

200, 297 f. 



13 »-i3 

13 i« 

13^3 
1330 

1332 



23; 



149 

1410 

1417 

1420 

J 4 22-25 

1427 

1428 

14 « 

1455 
14 58 f. 
14 62 

1534 
16^ 

16 « 
16*2 

16 "-*« 

1 32 f. 

1 35f. 

2 40 ff • 

3 10-14 

3 2lf. 

4 1-13 
4 16-30 

g 20-49 

6 22 
g23 
6 27 

6 29f. 

6*8 
fj 1-10 

718-35 

7 31 ff . 



Luke 



315^- 
54, 239, 245, 263, 

313, 315^- 
55,315 
. 194 
. 194 
. 194 

315 ff. 
34, 136, 160 

- 134 
. 194 

- 325 
• 325 
326 ff. 

- 154 
134, 136, 160 

. 134 
. 146 

. 139 



. 61 
. 61 

. 184 
169 

177 ff. 

186 ff. 
. 61 
. 225 

214 ff. 
• 255 

275 n. 
. 217 
. 218 
222, 224 
. 226 

228 ff. 
- 237 



Luke — continued. 



9 Iff. 

g 23-27 

9 ^* 
926 

9 ^^ 
950 

9 ^* 
954 

956 

958 

Oiff. 

0l3f. 
2lf. 

23 f. 

1* 

1 20 

1 21 f. 
1 23 
1 30 
1 31 f. 

1^1 

1 49-51 

2« 
210 

2 40 

2^9 f. 

325 

3 26 f. 
3 28-30 

3 34 f. 

426 

427 

616 

7 24, 26. 30 

7 33 200, 

g29 
34 
910 

.9" 



196 
194, 198 

294 
211 
203 

327 

248 f. 

298 

194 

303 

260 

196 

231,247 

237 f. 
250 
281 
284 
187 

247 ff. 
261 
249 

275 n. 

251 ff. 

202, 255, 264 

262, 283 

. 264 

220, 298, 303 

- 223 
222 f. 

. 226 

251 ff. 
. 207 

- 294 

• 23s 
264 

210 f., 295 
. 297 

• 299 
205, 303 
220, 300 



366 



JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 



Luke — continued. 


John — contimced. 




PAGE 




PACK 


20 1 «. 


. 228 


12 1« 


. 307 


21 12 


200, 297 


12 33 


. 88 


21 " 


200, 297 


W 


85, 220 


22 24-" 


300, 3<^3 


W 


. . S3 


22 2« 


. 300 


14 9f. 


. . 83 


22 30 


. 194 


16^2 


. . 78 


22 66-70 ^ 


. 326 


17 2 f. 


82, 83 


22 «« 


- 327 


18^7 


. 220 


24 1« 


. 218 


193* 


. 87, 89 


24 86 ff. 


- 139 


20 19 «• . 


- 139 


24 39 ff. ] ; 


129, 131 


20 23 


. 86 


24 « f . . 


. 62 


20^1 


82, 139 


24 4« 


. 136 


Acts 




24^2 


. 63 


1* 


. 131 


Joms 




1' 


. 192 


1 1-^ 


. 81 


I2lf. . 14, 


56,162,356 


1^2 . . 


. 80 


2 


117 f. 


1 " ^^• 


- 79 


221 


22,43 


ii« ! ! 


. 80 


222 


14, 54 


ii« . . 


80, 84 


223 


. 17 


129 ^ ^ 


. 86 


22* 


. Ill 


3 


. 87 f. 


2?3 


. 18,43,101 


3i« . . 


. 84 


2^8 


. 18 


3^^ . . 


. 85 


321 


- 17 


429 


- 225 


412 


, 16, 22, 208 


4^ 


. . 85 


53« 


. .* 17 


520 . . 


- 239 


531 . , 


. no 


5 21 ff . 


. . 84 


5*1 


. . 46 


6 


. . 87 f. 


72« 


. 105 


6*^ 


286 n. 


w 


. 15 


6^3 


. 59 


10 38 


• 54 


6^» 


. 89 


10 39 


• 17 


82* 


83, 203 


10 *i 


. 131 


82« . . 


Ss, 203 


10 *2 


. no 


8^« 


. 203 


10^3 


. 16 


10* 


- ^33 


11 15-17 . 


- 17 


10 1« 


82, 220 


12 12 


- 157 


10^0 


. 84 


15 « . . 


- 17 


10 *o 


. 228 


18^ 


. 120 w. 


11 *9 «. , 


.87,89 


192 


- 353 



INDEX 



367 



Acts — continued. 
20^ . . 



Romans 



1* 
1^ 

116 
325 

5 12 «. 

6* 

6* 

828 

10 » 

1» 

2« 

3" 
321 

7 10,25 

9^ 
9 ^° 

11 23 ff. 

12 3 
12 4-« 
13*-» 
15 
15' 
15*-« 
155 

15 " «• 
15 27 f. 
15=^» 
15 « «. 
15" 



I Corinthians 



PAGE 
22 

37 
37 
30 
88 

238 
21 
22 



22 
21,46,105 

22 
238 
321 

105 
120W. 

319 f- 

21 ff. 

43 

224 

102 ff. 

17,37 

137 

194 

120 ff. 

258 

22 

30 
107 



2 Corinthians 



12 

119 
1 20 

3 



22 

21 

16 

319 



2 Corinthians — continued. 



5l3f. 






PAGE 
I20W. 


5 "-21 


, 




- 37 


5" 


, 




. 19 


8» 


• 




. 36 


11* 


. 




21 




Galatians 




1^ 


, 




. 23 


1» 


• 




22 


1« 


, 




. 26 


2i9f. 


• 




, 210 


3" 


• 




i7»37 




Ephesians 




1^ 


• 




. 38 


1 19 f. 


. 




. 106 


218 


. 




. 43 


320 


, 




. 106 


5 25ff. 


, 




. 282 




Phhtppians 




2 5ff. 


• 


. 36 


304 w. 


321 


. 


106, 129 




COLOSSIANS 




land 2 


. 


• < 


32 


2» 


. 


. 


33 


410 


. 


. 


• 157 


I 


Thessalonians 


P 


, 




22,29 


1^ 


• 




120 


3« 


• 




29 


3 "• 12 


. 




. 29 


42, le 


, 




29 


5 12, 18, 28 




29 


5^« 


. 




29,37 



2 Thessalonians 
1 ^ . . 22, 29 

1" . . .29 

3*' ^2. 18 ... 29 

2 Timothy 
4" ... 157 



368 



JESUS AND THE GOSPEL 



Ver. 24 
1* 

•7 19, 22 

8« 

g 12, 14 15 

g23 

1320 
2* 

2' 

4» 

412 
57-8 

5 i3-i« 

1 2, 3 
1" 

1 18 f. 

1 20 f. 

2 21 ff . 

3 18-4 8 

322 

5" 

1* 
2* 

1^ 
11^ 

13 

1^ 



Titus 

Philemon 
Hebrews 



James 



Peter 



43i 



Peter 
I John 



48 

157 

41 
258 
41 
41 
41 
41 
41 
42 

41 
41 

45 
46 
46 
225 
46 
46 

43 
254 

43 
148, 227 

43 
43 
43 
43 
157 

47 
47 

162 

77 
72 

73 



I John — continued. 



2 If. 
22 

2 5f. 

212 

2 18-22 
2 22 
2 23 £. 

2 28 

3 2f. 
3 16 

43 

4» 
410 

414 

417 

5« 

5iif. 

520 

Ver. 7 
Ver. 7 



Ver. 4 
" 20 
'» 24 f- 



2 John 

3 John 
Jude 



Revelation 



110 

1 12 ff. 

2 and 3 
314 

19 » 
19 1« 
19^3 
20 « 
21 » 
22 » 
22^0 



73 
86 

74 
73 
75 
75 
72 

75 

75 

305 

75 f. 

73 f. 

86 

74 
75 
87 
72 
72 



75 

46 

47 
49 
49 

103 

68 

66fif. 

70 

282 

66, 70 

70 

71 

282 

70 

68 



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